Croatian balancing market inducts Nano Energies’ VPP

Nano Energies has entered the Croatian balancing market, starting with the induction of biogas and biomass stations into their Virtual Power Plant (VPP) services for grid balancing, providing almost 20MW of flexible electricity.

In a press statement, the European balancing services company stated their entry into the country as bringing the aggregation of flexible energy assets, “one of the key ways of effective energy management in times of crisis and uncertainty”.

In addition to smartly managing electricity consumption and production, the VPP is hoped to help reduce operating costs.

“We can help our clients to reduce energy costs by 10-30%, without the need to transform their daily operations. Our customers’ normal operations are not affected because the whole process happens automatically. For companies that operate 24 hours a day and have variable energy consumption, cost savings can be even higher”, explained Dominik Marinčević, Nano Energies Hrvatska country manager.

One of the key users of the VPP is Energija Gradec. As the largest biogas electricity producer in Croatia, the company accounts for one fifth of the country’s total production of biogas energy.

And with its five biogas plants, Energija Gradec is licensed to generate energy from its total installed capacity of 9.8MW and produces around 80,000MWh of electricity annually.

Nano Energies has developed its software platform to enable communication with the dispatching systems of the Croatian TSO, HOPS.

This allows controlling and communicating with devices, combined together in the Nano Energies Croatia VPP.

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Balancing generation with transmission

The company will connect smaller and larger producers and consumers of electricity into a centrally managed intelligent system. This system acts as one large VPP and enables users to reduce overall costs while helping the national grid to stay in balance.

This approach is hoped to help increase the adoption of more renewable sources of energy, which are variable, based on weather and without careful management can generate imbalances in the electricity system.

For the electricity network to be stable and prevent blackouts, the generation of electricity must always equal consumption.

Thus enters Nano Energies’ system, which remotely operates energy assets when there is a need to balance the grid.

Krešimir Milorad, president of the management board of Energija Gradec, stated on the partnership: “The biggest advantage of this partnership…[is] the balancing of the electricity system any time there is an electricity surplus in the grid.

To provide a grid-balancing response…Nano Energies has our flexible capacities constantly at its disposal and is able to activate them, while disconnecting from the grid for a maximum of two hours.”

HERA’s certification in the fall of 2021 enabled Nano Energies Hrvatska to be among the first to legally and completely enter the market of the Republic of Croatia and present the virtual power plant service.