Aneo Central in Innovation Project: Establishment of Local Energy and Flexibility Market

In late September, Aneo was awarded second place in the Smart Grid Center's Innovation Prize 2023. The prize was received by Gøril Forbord, Executive Director of Technology and Development, and Ella-Lovise Rørvik from the project team.

The EU project +CityxChange is concluding this month, and during the five-year project period, Aneo significantly participated in the subproject of establishing a local energy and flexibility market in Trondheim.

A visionary project

With 10 participating countries, 32 partners, and Trondheim as the flagship city, Aneo has contributed to establishing, operating, and running the local market. Project leader Bernhard Kvaal admits that the project presented startup challenges:

– It was difficult to find a way to convince regulatory authorities, Tensio, Statnett, and Elhub – the latter had to program a special solution for us to establish this market.

Need to better utilize the grid in the future

The core of the +CityxChange project has been to demonstrate that it's possible to create districts that produce more energy than they consume over a year. In Trondheim, the projects have been located in the districts of Brattøra and Sluppen.

Kvaal points out that there are currently no incentives that allow the production and sharing of electricity between buildings, as has been done in this project. When the available grid capacity is exhausted, and you can't connect new consumption, new solutions and technologies need to be adopted. The lack of grid capacity is becoming a significant issue in Norway and other countries.

– There is still room in the Norwegian grid if we can, on a large scale, recreate a market where we use the grid more intelligently, emphasizes Kvaal.

Photo from July 4, 2022, when Aneo conducted its first trade in the local market.

AI has been a part of the success

Kvaal believes that what they have achieved in this innovation project probably wouldn't have been possible when they wrote the applications more than five years ago.

– At that time, we didn't have an AI department. They have been crucial in this project, and now we can't see how we would have accomplished what we set out to do without the AI department.