Fraunhofer Selects Eguana Inverter for Smart Grid Energy Storage Research
Eguana Technologies Inc. announced that the Smart Grid Research Group of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute has selected Eguana's Bi-Direx inverter as the control platform to be used in developing creative control strategies that will allow distributed energy storage systems to contribute to load balancing strategies implemented by utilities and energy aggregators. Bi-directional inverters, like Eguana's Bi-Direx inverter, which are able to seamlessly move from charge to discharge mode; and to respond in real time to capacity and pricing signals from the power grid will be essential components.
"Smart "edge-of-grid" power electronics will be a critical element of the system control strategies that will make decentralized residential and commercial storage capacity available to the power grid for load balancing in real time," said Brent Harris, CTO of Eguana Technologies Inc. "Fraunhofer specifically chose Bi-Direx for its flexibility and advanced high speed bi-directional controls which enable the storage systems to react in real time to capacity and pricing signals from the grid. We are very proud to be part of this ground breaking research," Harris added.
In the US, distributed energy storage - i.e. decentralized systems "distributed" around the power grid is expected to drive growth in distributed generation from the current level of 1% of total installations to as much as 1/3 of America's installations by 2017.
In Germany a $3.6 billion per year market is predicted in energy trading by 2020, where energy aggregators are expected to gather portfolios of smaller generation and storage systems to match load fluctuations through forecasting, advance metering and computerized control. Performing real-time optimization of energy resources, these virtual power plants represent an 'Internet of Energy,' tapping existing grid networks to tailor electricity supply and demand services for a customer.
