TenneT is increasingly turning to digital solutions to prepare our grid for more volatile renewable energy sources. As such, the TSO is investing in many innovations to unlock new flexibility, such as advanced data analytics, crowd balancing and blockchain technology. Its project with Sonnen, a Shell New Energies company is one of these.

TenneT’s partnership with sonnen, a company that specialises in home energy storage systems, aims to manage grid congestions through flexible use of batteries, in order to maintain reliability of the power system.

In the pilot project, TenneT and sonnen tested a ‘virtual power plant’ providing electricity from home storage for redispatch (so-called redispatch).

In this way, sonnen and TenneT were able to continuously monitor how much capacity the home storage facilities could provide for redispatch back into the grid. The sonnen batteries were used to accept excess energy in regions where, for example, there was too much wind power. To keep the balance, other sonnen batteries simultaneously discharged the same amount of energy into a region with too little wind power. The whole process was documented in real time in a blockchain.

The project showed that this blockchain has the potential to become a key technology when it comes to efficient grid-stabilising measures from battery storage and other decentralised storage, such as electric vehicle batteries.