Electric grids must maintain a delicate equilibrium to provide stable electricity for the many who rely on it. As electric demand continues to rise with growing EV adoption and living and working in an increasingly digital world full of devices, keeping grid power in check becomes more difficult for operators.
Such challenges for balancing service partners (BSPs), responsible for ensuring that grid electricity generation matches consumption, create revenue opportunities for EV-site owners who could be compensated to discharge their available power onto the grid, or curtail their electricity use from it to help utilities maintain reliable 24/7 power.
Participating in grid programs
Services that ensure reliability and support the transmission of electricity from generation sites to customer loads are known as ancillary services, such as load regulation and voltage support. When you add energy storage to your EV charging site, you gain the opportunity to generate additional revenue by providing ancillary services through grid programs.
- U.S. customers in some territories can participate in demand response programs in which they are compensated for reducing or curtailing their electricity use as requested by the utility during periods of high power prices or compromised grid reliability.
- European customers can participate in grid programs in the fast frequency response (FFR) and frequency containment reserve (FCR) markets where BSPs rapidly adjust electricity generation or consumption to counteract fluctuations in grid frequency to prevent grid instability and power outages.
Program participants are compensated for their ability to respond quickly (sometimes in milliseconds) and accurately to grid events, so having a solution that can assess site power, loads and grid needs in real-time is key to generating additional revenue while seamlessly maintaining your everyday operations.
Automatic bidding
Sparkion combines robust hardware and cloud technology to simultaneously aggregate power from multiple onsite sources and feed it into the grid, or curtail grid power use, in sub-seconds to enable monetizing your network in the energy market.
Sparkion is the only provider that directly connects with EV chargers and other assets including onsite renewable energy and batteries to integrate all available power into your ancillary service bid. By combining real-time insight about electricity use from your onsite meter data and BSP requirements via an API, Sparkion uses advanced algorithms to make intelligent decisions that maximize revenue potential by making automatic market bids when opportunities arise without jeopardizing the uptime of your operations.
To learn more, read about our smart EV charging solutions here.
