(Andrew Lyle, Locogen and Rosie McGlynn, Mentone Energy, celebrate earlier ‘Dragon’s Den’ style pitch win for Cloud ZuoS at LCNI)
Cloud ZuoS triumphs after series of pitches and presentations
Following a keenly contested series of pitches and presentations, Locogen, together with Scene, Mentone Energy and Enbala, are delighted to be chosen as finalists in the Power Forward Challenge, landing £800,000 in funding for development of the innovative Cloud ZUoS platform. This groundbreaking technology will facilitate local energy markets, where renewable generators and consumers can trade with one another to benefit from affordable, clean energy, with grid costs more accurately calculated and fairly allocated according to actual usage.
The Power Forward Challenge is a joint initiative sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), offering a total of £11 million funding to develop the best smart energy solutions.
The rapid growth of distributed generation, renewables, EV infrastructure and storage creates new challenges for electricity grids that were designed for a completely different model of central generation and outwards transmission. The Power Forward Challenge has been created to encourage innovations to allow the grid to meet today’s challenges of a far more complex and distributed generation landscape.
Alongside our partners (Scene, Mentone Energy and Enbala), Locogen is developing Cloud ZUoS (Zonal Use of System), an energy services platform to address the main grid constraints preventing wider deployment of distributed energy resources (DER). These constraints result in rising grid costs, which are then borne by all consumers. They also slow the access of renewables onto the grid and lead to lost revenue from not optimising DER assets.
By overcoming these issues – thermal constraints, absence of bi-directional power flow capability and the lack of a local power trading network, we can help the development of a dynamic new smart grid fit for the 21st century.
Cloud ZuoS to be piloted with Huntly & District Development Trust
The Cloud ZUoS system will be road-tested for 9 months, during a pilot at Huntly in the northeast of Scotland. We will be working in conjunction with Huntly & District Development Trust to bring together local domestic and commercial consumers, along with local renewable energy generators, to put Cloud ZUoS through its paces.
The project integrates our ZUoS energy trading platform with Enbala’s Virtual Power Plant to allow active network management and quantification of grid use for accurate billing.
It will also facilitate the creation of a Local Energy Market (LEM) with energy trading between local consumers and renewable generators.
Locogen has always been committed to a more democratic, distributed energy sector, where local communities can share in the benefits of clean and affordable energy and consumers can buy their energy directly from local generators. Cloud ZUoS represents a key milestone on the journey to making that vision a reality.
Please contact us for more information.