How intelligent flexibility can make renewables more profitable

Enlit on the Road visited Trumau, near Vienna, Austria, to learn how project partners CyberGrid and EVN are redefining collaboration between renewable assets — not only to generate clean energy, but to optimise and monetise it too.

The project tackles one of the energy transition’s core challenges: how to manage variability and market volatility while keeping renewables economically viable. Instead of relying solely on continuous generation, the system introduces ‘intelligent flexibility’—an automated orchestration of assets across multiple energy markets. 

“It’s the first of its kind in Austria,” said Christian Lechner, Head of New Energy Systems for EVN, which owns the hybrid system, consisting of the 16MW Tattendorf wind farm and the 10MW Trumau photovoltaic plant. 

The addition of the battery storage system makes it the first co-location of storage, wind and solar PV in the country, a combination born out of necessity. 

“We noticed that we had to switch or curtail our PV and wind turbines many hours a year due to negative prices,” said Lechner. “And it’s of course a shame to drop this renewable energy. So, we said we would like to have storage.”

But curtailment reduction alone wasn’t enough to make storage profitable. “The PV curtailment itself is a very good use case,” Lechner explained, “but it does not make battery storage economically feasible. What you need to do is feed in optimisation on the one hand, and on the other hand, you need to use the battery for multi-marketing—playing ancillary services and intraday markets for additional revenues.”

For example, says Lechner, with the inclusion of the battery, the hybrid system is active on all available markets for such co-location, including Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR), Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR), and Manual Frequency Restoration Reserve (mFRR), which are products on the balancing market, as well as day-ahead and intraday markets.

And it is in the battery's multi-marketing where EVN’s partnership with CyberGrid comes in, using its flexibility management platform CyberNoc to optimise and monetise the flexibility of the energy assets on the balancing and wholesale energy markets. 

Said Lechner: “The process basically starts every day in the morning for the next day.

“We have forecasts for price, for power generation [and] overall state of the system. This all combined gives us a good picture of what to do with the battery the next day, or the next minute, or the next 15 minutes."

Key to all of this working smoothly is automation.

According to Christian Seitl, CyberGrid’s Senior Battery & Market Strategy Expert, in operation, the flexibility tech uses forecasts and measurements for optimisation.

“Based on that, we would decide to charge the battery or … wait [to] charge the battery while also doing balancing service. 

“This is running all the time during the weekend and during the night; it runs automatically. There [are] no people sitting there. We are analysing the behaviour, but in operation, that's all automated.”

Watch the full interview to hear about the project’s technical challenges in connecting a range of distributed and decentralised assets, how the project serves as a blueprint for future similar initiatives and how EVN was a forerunner in policy and permitting for getting this type of project ready.

More from Enlit on the Road Austria:
How viable is e-mobility in Austria as a source of power grid flexibility?