Intellihub Demand Flexibility Platform Project

Summary

Need

The recent growth in CER such as hot water systems, rooftop solar, battery storage, pool pumps, and electric vehicles (EV) present the energy industry with both a significant challenge and an exciting opportunity. Uncoordinated, these CER contribute to stability and reliability challenges for the grid. However, when aggregated at sufficient volume through VPPs CER can provide much needed demand flexibility, unlocking benefits for retailers, networks and consumers. 

The vast majority of CER is at present ‘inflexible’, meaning it’s not possible to harness the benefits of flexibility from the gigawatts of energy that they generate or consume. To date, the industry has not been able to efficiently aggregate these resources into VPPs at scale due to the cost and complexities of integrating multiple device types and device manufacturers. Scalable CER connectivity and interoperability between customer, grid and market systems are critical to realising the full potential of CER and mitigating their adverse impacts.  

This project aims to overcome these barriers by delivering an end-to-end solution that enables connectivity to multiple device types and manufacturers through a single integration, enabling enrolment of more than 100,000 devices into VPPs. 

Action

Intellihub is a utility services company that delivers innovative metering, digital and data solutions that enables new energy services with customers across residential, commercial, industry and embedded networks. 

Intellihub and GreenSync will partner with device manufacturers to develop the connectivity layer that enables flexible operation of customer devices (e.g. hot water systems, solar PV, electric vehicle chargers, home batteries and pool pumps). The project is targeting registration of over 100,000 devices totalling over 500MW on the demand flexibility platform.  

The project will allow VPP operators such as retailers and networks to enrol multiple device types across different device manufacturers in their VPPs through a single integration with the demand flexibility platform, providing a cost effective and secure pathway to enabling device connectivity at scale, and enabling more consumers to participate in VPPs.   

Outcome

The project will achieve the following outcomes: 

1. increase the value delivered by renewable energy through delivery of a platform that is agnostic to device manufacturer, retailer and aggregator, enables the enrolment of multiple devices by multiple market participants, and development of a cost efficient and scalable pathway to device orchestration for both system security and customer benefits; 
2. improved commercial readiness by unlocking the financial opportunity for device owners and market participants to benefit from the orchestration of these resources by accessing wholesale market and network services revenue; and 
3. removal of barriers to renewable energy uptake through supporting DNSPs to deliver non-network services, delay augmentation and reduce customer costs, and supporting energy retailers to develop new customer offerings that together incentivise the uptake of controllable devices.