Minute-by-minute flexibility

Conor Maher-McWilliams, head of flexibility at Ovo’s smart technology arm Kaluza, discusses the company’s direct-to-car smart charging trial with Bosch, why some networks are easier to deal with than others, and how it is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand flexibility in heating.  

Towards the end of October, Kaluza and Bosch announced they had successfully used a digital platform to remotely control the charging of an electric vehicle.

The partners claimed this new direct control capability would allow smart charging to spread faster and more widely by reducing its dependence on separate smart charging hardware and avoiding issues over compatibility.

Connor Maher-McWilliams, head of flexibility at Kaluza, says their trial with Bosch, which supplies charging equipment to a number of carmakers around the world, is “really breaking new ground in direct-to-EV controls.”

“In electric vehicle smart charging, there’s a number of different ways you can deliver the key services – you can either talk to the chargepoint or you can talk to the vehicle itself – and also different benefits and trade-offs,” he says.

In the case of home charging, Maher-McWilliams says directly controlling either the vehicle or a smart charger has the benefit of bypassing smart meters and their limitations.

“It’s not that to say the smart meter doesn’t have some potential role in domestic flexibility but whenever we look at the spec of the smart meter and the frequency at which we can retrieve data from it, and also the level of control that we have from a smart meter, the devices themselves already outperform what we can do via the smart meter.

“The fastest way to deliver the most innovative product is not through the smart meter as we see it but rather through direct integration with devices like chargepoints.”

He says the solution trialled by Kaluza and Bosch allows them to receive updates on a minute-by-minute basis.

“For example, if it’s a vehicle-to-grid chargepoint, we get the latest charging or discharging power, we get the state of charge and the battery health… That means every minute we can reassess whether the charging decision we’re making right now is the right one or should we change the state of the charging.”

He continues: “The imbalance price is a super dynamic price signal that can move quite quickly depending on if there’s short-term power station trip. Having that minute-by-minute access to data allows us to respond very quickly to the latest market opportunity and also provide very quick support to the grid if necessary.”

The networks

Kaluza has also been busy this year working with Western Power Distribution (WPD) on its ongoing Intraflex project.

“They teamed up with Nodes to do more closer to real time flexibility,” says Maher-McWilliams, “and in that market, we’ve used a mixed portfolio of in-home batteries, unidirectional EV smart chargers and bidirectional vehicle-to-grid chargepoints.”

“If they need flexibility, we can respond on demand and deliver that response within a few seconds for the majority of the portfolio,” he adds.

“If you start to think about scaling up the potential for flexibility, having that quick responsiveness means you can compete with and outperform the majority of assets providing flexibility services.”

Maher-McWilliams says Kaluza has so far put much more effort into providing new flexibility services to distribution network operator (DNOs) like WPD than competing in the established national markets run by National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO).

He says most DNOs, though “not all of them”, have been keen to work closely with companies like Kaluza to gain a better understanding of their needs and concerns, and cites WPD and UK Power Networks as being among the more “forward-thinking”.

WPD, for instance, has set up its markets in a way that allows the registration of assets to be more heavily automated: “For some of the other DNOs, the processes are a bit more manual. We’re not going into markets where there’s a lot of manual overhead because the benefit just isn’t there to us.”

He says this a problem they also face with the ESO: “National Grid is a big focus for our next phase but they’ve got fully functioning markets. They’re very slow to change and their position is: ‘Well, we’ve got out markets. Anyone can play in them. Here are the rules.’

“They don’t make it amenable for certain types of providers.”

“If you think about the electrification of transport, you’ve got two huge, somewhat traditional industries going through big transformations and I think they really need to come together in the middle to drive the full benefits,” he remarks.

“We need to see more of people stepping outside of their traditional roles and embrace the opportunities that this new world creates.”

Decarbonisation of heat

This new world is also expected to see domestic heating create even larger requirements for and source of flexibility.

Speaking to Utility Week prior to the announcement of a new target to install 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028, Maher-McWilliams argues: “We really need to be serious about how we’re going to decarbonise heat and get off gas boilers, and people talk about hydrogen but I think we can’t delay cracking on with the technologies that exist and we work today.”

“Heat is definitely an area we spend a lot of time thinking about and are preparing for that scale to lift off,” he adds.

Maher-McWilliams says Kaluza has been experimenting with heat pumps as part of a number of innovation programmes: “We’re really trying to get into what is the flexibility available from a heat pump. How do you manage those heat pumps to keep the customer’s comfort level the same but whilst pulling out as much flexibility as you can?”

He says making smart EV charging compelling means offering the technology in a way that is simple and intuitive.

Their current product allows customers to see information on the current state of charge and set how much they want their vehicle to be changed and by when. Their platform then finds the best way to fulfil these requirements whilst also generating value in the complex and confusing energy market.

The challenge for heating is similar, only there are many more variables: “Each house is different. The fabric is different. It’s exposure to sunlight is different. There’s a whole series of factors that will affect how the temperature changes within that property.”

He says Kaluza has been using artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop algorithms that can build physical models of customers’ homes, down to the heat capacity of each room, and predict how they will respond to different situations and actions.

“It’s a more evolved problem, but we’ve been doing this for quite a few years, starting with storage heaters. We’ve got a lot of experience in it. We’ve got quite a good understanding of those physical models and how temperature behaves as you start to tweak certain parameters.”

But he says there is still a long way to go before companies like Kaluza can start unlocking the full value of this knowledge: “There’s a lot to do to make a marketplace that is really fair and creates the right environment for residential flexibility to truly flourish without being inhibited by any barriers.”

Smart meters

Despite his reservations about smart meters as a way of controlling other devices, Maher-McWilliams says the slow progress of the rollout and delays to the accompanying settlement arrangements are nevertheless some of the main obstacles to progress.

“All of this stuff is underpinned by smart metering; having that smart meter data that we can then use to half-hourly-settle customers so when they shift their demand around that does actually create some financial value in the wholesale markets.

“Ovo Energy and other suppliers have led the way in elective half-hourly settlement but we really need to complete the smart meter rollout as swiftly as we can… And then also follow that up with market-wide half-hourly settlement that create the right underlying incentives for customers who offer their flexibility.”

None of this has been helped by the coronavius pandemic, which has sucked up time and resources and put the brakes on the smart meter rollout for months on end.

Maher-McWilliams says it has similarly been “a bit of a stop-start year” for Kaluza. He says the expansion of their portfolio has stalled somewhat throughout 2020 but they are hoping to make up lost ground once the UK moves out of a second lockdown and into the new year: “We’ve shown the ability to grow that quite rapidly.”