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Description
Futugrid is making it possible to temporarily decrease power consumption during moments of high demand and provide the time needed to bring alternative power sources (gas and hydro power plants) on line. Time is critical, because power shortages usually occur quite suddenly, while ordinary power plants need some time to start up before they are able to produce energy. Futugrid enables a reaction to take place within seconds and quickly provides balanced energy to the electrical grid. A quick change in demand or supply will affect the grid balance and grid frequency. Network frequency is critical to keeping all power systems working properly. Maintaining frequency is very important because if it deviates outside of the tolerated range it will lead to a total blackout, and all consumers will be left without power. It will be of particular importance in 2025, when Estonia de-synchronises from the BRELL energy system, which today connects Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia. At that point, the balance of energy will become even more essential, because a smaller system is more vulnerable to frequency changes.
According to economical and geopolitical situation around the Europa several problems has occurred. From one hand the last 2 years have been lot of problems with logistics and chip delivery and from the other hand risks on the energy market and security of supply have increased, energy prices are more volatile, average spot price is much higher than couple of years before and Demand Response is more on focus than ever before. These events have made important impact to Futugrid as it has become a priority to develop end user solution at first. The basic functionality has been developed, next steps are to improve optimisation algorithm, add extra features and develop End User mobile application. End User mobile app is a additional need and will be work package no 6 in our timeline.