Reactive Technologies has launched Tradenergy, a software tool that provides short-term energy traders with real-time insights into grid events such as generation or interconnector trips. By streamlining energy traders’ ability to rapidly match electricity supply to demand, Tradenergy helps maintain the resilience and reliability of power grid operations.
“For the past five years, we have been working on perfecting a technology that would enable other stakeholders in addition to grid operators to benefit from grid insights,” Marc Borrett, CEO and Co-founder of Reactive Technologies, said. “Built on the foundation of our first-of-its-kind grid insight product Grid-Sonar™, Tradenergy facilitates more efficient transactions on short-term electricity markets that help ensure grid stability–an increasingly important benefit as grids integrate more diverse, lower-carbon energy assets.”
On a power grid, inertia is naturally produced by turbines and motors in fossil fuel generators that are synchronized to the same frequency. Grid inertia provides an extra boost of energy that can temporarily keep power flowing through a grid after a generator stops working.
Tradenergy grid inertia forecasting and monitoring provides insight on overall grid state and potential need for stabilizing actions. By tapping into the power of Reactive Technologies’ patented Grid-Sonar™ technology, Tradenergy users obtain high-speed, locational grid alerts. Additionally, probabilistic balancing market (BM) forecasts offer actual BM volumes broken down by fuel type–combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), wind, coal, and pumped storage.
The benefits of Tradenergy include:
- Real-time Grid Insights: High-speed notification of locational grid events such as power station and interconnector trips.
- Inertia Forecasting: Forecasting periods of low inertia allow asset owners and optimizers to make their assets available to grid operators when needed to help stabilize the system.
- Balancing Mechanism Forecasting: Insight on expected grid constraint-driven market activity.
As Europe heads into a challenging winter as predicted by the National Grid ESO, increased sensitivity to interconnector availability will become more prominent across the continent. For example, Great Britain has already shifted from an importer to a net exporter of electricity to Europe this year. This is driven by international gas shortages and reduced availability of French nuclear power. In early September, Tradenergy enabled visibility to a failure on one of the interconnectors between the UK and France. This resulted in a near-instantaneous loss of 1GW of export from the UK to France and the grid frequency increasing above National Grid’s operational limits to 50.25Hz. With the support of batteries providing fast responding frequency services such as Dynamic Containment (DC) introduced by National Grid to ensure the lights can be kept on with lower levels of inertia on the grid, the system was returned to operational limits within four minutes with no disruption to end consumers. However, electricity imports and exports between the UK and Europe were disrupted for several hours, resulting in price movements of over 20% in the UK and impacting multiple European markets. Real-time grid insights provided by Tradenergy will allow market participants to react quickly to similar events and keep the power flowing to where it is most needed this winter.
Tradenergy is one of the solutions offered by Reactive Technologies that deliver operational visibility and accurate measurements of electrical grids in real time, helping accelerate the transition to zero carbon energy systems worldwide.
Reactive is currently offering online demonstrations of Tradenergy to energy traders and other stakeholders looking to gain grid insights and competitive advantage.
