Solo has created an energy trading economy that allows consumers to share renewable energy across the grid via a blockchain-based, peer-to-peer energy trading platform known as FlexiGrid. It centrally controls the batteries and chargers, enabling hosts to share excess local generation quickly and easily across the grid.
This digitally connected series of batteries and electric vehicles is known as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) – an intelligent, connected system of assets in homes and businesses across the grid that enables the flexible supply and demand of energy. This flexibility helps balance the intermittency of renewable energy generation and allows hosts to receive energy that is stored in the assets of other hosts when necessary, allowing Solo to shape demand to follow renewable supply.
By remotely controlling the hosted batteries and chargers, Solo can charge them from onsite solar and wind generation facilities, or from the grid when sufficient renewable generation is already present. When renewable generation decreases, the energy stored in hosts’ batteries or electric vehicles is used to supply homes and businesses instead, which also enables the energy to be supplied cheaply.
The challenge
In order for the energy to be stored and shared securely, Solo needed to find a control platform capable of remotely communicating with and controlling the batteries and chargers, as well as enabling vast amounts of data to be recorded and securely stored. The platform needed to allow Solo to control and remotely communicate with all its distributed assets both individually and as a collective unit, enabling energy to be shared between them quickly and efficiently.
It also needed to provide visualisation tools capable of enabling Solo to visualise and analyse all its energy data so that it could identify trends and improve performance of the VPP, and present this information back to its customers as a simple, user-friendly interface. In order to allow Solo’s software to grow along with the business, the virtualisation software needed to be fully scalable.
With data security of paramount importance, Solo also needed to find the most secure environment in which to host the control platform – one which required zero IT infrastructure in order to deliver a cost-effective option, and which could be quickly setup, deliver 24-hour monitoring and comprehensive customer support, and guarantee uptime.
The solution
Daniel Dransfield, VP of Engineering at Solo Energy, said: “We needed a control platform that we could deploy quickly, that would remove the need for secondary OPC software, offer object-based deployment to make scaling more efficient, allow for quick development of visualisation clients for the VPP, and deliver excellent data storage and reporting capabilities. It was also important for us that our platform provider be able to deliver comprehensive customer support, particularly while the project was in its infancy and just getting off the ground.”
“System Platform also allows screen resolution independent templates of your assets to be digitally modelled and shared on any device. This allows Solo to receive insights from its operations anywhere in the world, as well as keeping development and maintenance costs minimal. Crucially, it also enables application scaling from a single node to hundreds of nodes without the need to redesign the entire application. Using drag and drop technology, assets can be easily deployed onto other machines, allowing users to scale up from a single box solution to multi-tier deployment easily and in keeping with the needs of the business and the technology supporting it, offering a future-proof investment.”
Differently to most users, Solo have innovatively chosen to host System Platform in a cloud environment. Due to the nature of their business, they’re not restricted by safety or latency concerns which would make an on-premise solution necessary. So, hosting System Platform in the cloud allows them to eliminate the need for additional IT infrastructure and have a fully scalable and easily deployed system that can be installed with minimal resource.
