Is grid edge failing to deliver on its promise?

Is grid edge delivering on its promise of being “a more dynamic and responsive energy network”?

That was the question posed by Eva Gonzalez Isla of BloombergNEF to an expert panel on day two of Enlit Europe in Bilbao. 

Moderator Gonzalez Isla, Senior Associate for Grids at BloombergNEF, reminded the audience that what grid edge ultimately promised to deliver was “a better system”.

Gonzalez Isla highlighted that delivering the enormous potential benefits of grid edge requires digital investment, which as she explained, starts with smart meters, monitoring and communication between various disparate energy systems. 

“Once you have that foundation, then you can have automation, analytics and can digitalise most of the network.”

She also flagged that, despite the focus on digital for grid edge, at present digital is “a very small part of the investment that Europe needs on the grid if we want to achieve an economic transition”.

Gonzales Isla then encouraged a panel of experts to cut through this murky landscape of investment, legislation and connecting ageing power infrastructure with new digital tools.

Mark Sprawson, Chief Commercial Officer, VisNet from EA Technology, said that for him, the promise of grid edge was clear: “It’s about enabling the energy transition without having to rebuild the entire network. It’s about making our existing infrastructure smarter, more flexible and more resilient.”

Sprawson explained that grid edge was already starting to take shape, it just requires some more work to perfect. “Many networks are still effectively blind; that’s why monitoring is critical to grid edge. In the UK last winter, 2.4 million households participated in a scheme to manage their load: that’s the grid edge working,” he stated.

For Lorena Skiljan, founder and CEO at SaaS tech platform, nobile, delivering the much-touted resilience and flexibility benefits of grid edge by meeting the needs of today’s decentralised systems requires a focus on connection – between the different parts of the overall energy system – and also relies on far greater transparency. 

Skiljan emphasised that “transparency is needed so we can all move forward – and everyone on the market side wants this to move quicker”.

Stratis Kanarachos, Project Lead at Decodit, warned that, as much as the market and its various players have an important role to play, the industry must not forget the end users. 

“The critical aspect for any technology to succeed is that you need to engage the end users; unless they accept and engage with a technology, that technology cannot be a success,” he said. “If we don’t adequately address this point, none of the new digital technologies can deliver their promise.”

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Taking a different stance, Christian Baer, Secretary General at Europex, the association of European Energy exchanges, declared that, from his perspective, price signals and capitalising on the current liquidity (driven by the rise in adoption of EVs, for instance), was top priority. “There should be one clear steering mechanism, which is the market,” he said.

For Devrim Celal, Chief Marketing and Flexibility Officer at Kraken, market signals are secondary to the requirement to bring certain elements of power networks up to the new, future-ready spec. 

“Grid edge has not yet delivered on its promise. In fact, visibility at the edge of the networks is still in the dark ages,” he exclaimed. Celal pointed out that distribution networks today remain ‘dark’. “You can’t optimise something you can’t see,” he observed.

Celal pressed the need for a real-time systems view to enable the potential that is not currently being realised. He highlighted that “we only use a large majority of our networks at full capacity for a few hours a year: that needs to change”.

The experts agreed that both sides of the network – industry and consumer – require tools to make the current transition easier to navigate. Mark Sprawson noted that there are several questions to answer regarding how to coordinate the hyper local level with the DSOs, and around how transmission and distribution can work together more efficiently.

On the non-technical side, all speakers highlighted the role of, as Devrim Celal put it, “giving consumers what they want.” 

Lorena Skiljan added: “In my opinion, consumer trust is already there. We as service companies now need to act as translators between DSOs – who are used to dealing with a handful of utilities – and the consumers.” Celal also commented that, ultimately, “Affordability is key to the energy transition and achieving the self-healing networks of the future.”