Energy efficiency: What are the main issues?
During the last few years, and especially after the beginning of the energy crisis, many conversations about reducing energy prices have taken place, while customers try to find the best energy provider with the lowest price. Who can blame them? But let’s see the issue from the retailers’ perspective, shall we? One of the main issues retailers confront is selling electricity to their consumers, as they need to forecast their served demand and submit it to the day ahead (DA) wholesale market. But the uncertain demand of characteristics of the served consumers poses another challenge to retailers when offering the strategic retail price[1].
At the same time, under the Energy Efficiency Directive (2012/27/EU), EU countries must set up an energy efficiency obligation scheme. This scheme requires energy companies to achieve yearly energy savings of 1.5% of annual sales to final consumers. To reach this target, companies need to carry out measures that help final consumers improve energy efficiency[2].
Is there any solution?
A simple and cost-effective solution is for retailers to use management software to maintain a single point for all data related to energy consumption and analyze it to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency.
These kinds of tools are also important for retailers to trade interesting information, get the necessary advice for experts and improve their decision-making process with the ultimate goal to improve their costumer’s experience and achieve the targets that have been set for energy savings.
Going BEYOND and above!
To that end, BEYOND offers a specific tool for retailers, called Building Portfolio Management Optimisation Tool (BPMO). This tool will be incorporated into the BEYOND Big Data platform and will offer the following services to retailers:
- The development, presentation and utilization of retailer portfolio analytics for elasticity estimation and extraction of useful insights.
- The elasticity utilization in implicit Demand Response and the development of imbalance reduction strategies.
The main scope of the tool is to enable the sensible management of the retailers’ portfolio according to the needs for improved monitoring and adjusting of the consumers’ demand to minimize the costly imbalances of the retailers.
An important issue for retailers is the lack of accurate estimations of customers’ true demands. As such, their forecasting processes either bring in too much product or bring in too little product. The BPMP Tool will support the clustering of customers based on criteria specified by the retailer (level of demand, demographics, specific tariff, location, elasticity to price fluctuations), while it will also provide visualization of energy consumption and production at the building level. These functionalities will help retailers predict the demand of customers and take the correct decisions for energy prices.
Additionally, the tool will provide forecasting of the day ahead retail prices and it will also offer the option to retailers to add the pricing schemes reductions for the customer participation in the implicit DR programs.
Be patient and the BMPO tool will be available soon!
References
[1] Qiu, D., Dong, Z., Ruan, G., Zhong, H., Strbac, G. and Kang, C., 2022. Strategic retail pricing and demand bidding of retailers in electricity market: A data-driven chance-constrained programming. Advances in Applied Energy, 7, p.100100.
[2] https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/energy-efficiency-targets-directive-and-rules/obligation-schemes-and-alternative-measures_en#:~:text=Under%20the%20Energy%20Efficiency%20Directive,annual%20sales%20to%20final%20consumers.
