UCED energy group has launched its first virtual power plant. It will help ČEPS maintain balance in the electricity network. The virtual power plant consists of cogeneration units from UCED heating plants and a biogas station in Pustějov. This source has been providing power balance services as an aggregator to ČEPS since February 2022, announced Daniel Mareš, a spokesman for the Creditas group, of which UCED is a part. The main pillars of the Creditas Group’s business are financial services, real estate, rental housing and energy.
The UCED Group has joined several companies in the Czech Republic that help ČEPS – the operator of the electricity transmission system – to maintain balance in the electricity network. “As a backup, they must change the size of the electricity supply in the network within 15 minutes of the ČEPS request,” said Václav Skoblík, director of the New Energy Division of the UCED Group.
The brain of the virtual power plant is the internally developed UCED operational and commercial dispatching center. It provides remote operation control and production optimization, and other UCED resources are gradually involved in it. The cogeneration units and the UCED biogas plant are controlled by a clever algorithm – an industrial computer. Data from all connected devices are processed by computers, which ensure that the energy obtained from individual sources is consumed economically. Gradually, other production and consumption sources will be connected to it.
The UCED group has been preparing for the provision of power balance services as a new service in the power industry for almost a year. At the same time, it used the new rules for the operation of the transmission system, which opened the market of support services to smaller providers from January last year.
“More and more renewable production sources are joining the portfolio in the Czech Republic and the EU as a whole. Stable classics will continue to be shut down. Demand for support services from flexibility aggregators will grow. cogeneration units, electric boilers, biomass heating plants in Kutná Hora and Přerov, battery storage and external business partners,” said Skoblík.
The UCED Group is one of the electricity distributors in the Czech Republic. Its distribution systems supply energy to more than 6,000 regular customers, including industrial companies, logistics centers, office buildings, but also residential areas. The company wants to double the number of its customers in the coming years. UCED is part of the Creditas investment group, which focuses primarily on long-term investments in conservative industries.
Source: UCED and CTK
