Christophe Albertus, Head of the Engineering Design Department at Socomec, discusses how battery energy storage and decentralised resilience offer vital protection against growing electricity blackouts and grid disruptions in Europe.
The challenge of grid flexibility is widely known, yet recent electricity blackouts from the UK and the Canary Islands to mainland Spain and Portugal have thrust the issue of grid resilience back into the spotlight.
While the cause of these outages remains unclear, the switch to variable renewable energy sources creates new challenges around grid frequency and stability. Variations in renewable generation also pose a growing risk of gradual frequency fluctuations or ‘frequency drift’, potentially reducing power quality and damaging electrical equipment.
With the rapid electrification of the economy leaving industries increasingly exposed to grid instability, there is a growing need for more resilient and reliable power, especially for energy-intensive industrial and commercial consumers. Just as distributed computing helped protect the digital economy from data centre outages, the decentralisation of power management, energy storage and generation could similarly make our economy more resilient to power supply risks. Producing and storing more power onsite can provide essential backup power for large energy consumers and alleviate demand for electric grids.
The renewable risk to grid stability
High-profile recent blackouts across the Iberian Peninsula have sparked renewed discussion around the risk that renewable energy could pose to grid stability. With renewable energy accounting for 47% of net electricity generated in the EU and over 50% of the UK’s electricity mix in 2024, these concerns are increasing.
Research has shown that the rapid integration of renewable energy sources into the grid is reducing our ability to control grid frequency and stability. This is because renewable grids lack the inbuilt resilience of ‘system inertia’, the combined kinetic energy stored in many synchronously spinning power station turbines, which keeps them rotating and thus resistant to any sudden frequency shifts. This buys time to correct any imbalances.
As many renewables cannot directly produce Alternating Current (AC) power, they are also decoupled from the grid and thus cannot directly influence grid inertia. Weather-related variations in renewable generation can also produce ‘frequency drift’ where frequencies deviate from the required tempo of the grid, potentially affecting power quality and electrical equipment. Europe’s grids are also becoming more interconnected, which means any disruption to power supply can produce wider domino effects across the continent.
At the same time, the rapid electrification of the economy means that any grid instability can also produce ripple effects across multiple sectors. This was exemplified when recent outages in Spain caused widespread disruption across industrial and commercial facilities, from oil refineries and factories to food stores and hotels and wiped an estimated €1.6bn off annual GDP.
Decentralising resilience
Recent events have renewed the focus on improving power grid resilience with industry body Eurelectric estimating that Europe will need to invest €67bn a year from now until 2050 to make grids more stable. Yet there has been less discussion of the way that distributed energy generation and storage could provide decentralised resilience for industrial and commercial users, reducing reliance on utilities and providing an added layer of protection for our economy.
There are many technical challenges to providing off-grid backup power, such as controlling variable renewable energy output to avoid overcharging batteries and keeping the building’s voltage and frequency aligned with the ebb and flow of the grid. Buildings need to switch between different backup power sources, such as drawing from a generator when solar or wind produces less power. Battery cycles have to be intelligently managed to preserve their health and capacity and extend their lifespan.
Some pioneering organisations are now turning to smart battery energy storage systems (BESS) and onsite power sources from biomass to solar capable of providing off-grid power during an outage. Intelligent power management systems can now perform ‘planned islanding’, intentionally disconnecting from affected electricity networks and then conducting a ‘blackstart’, restoring full power from onsite battery energy storage and power sources within 30 seconds of a blackout. These systems even form microgrids able to operate fully independently from the main grid.
Advanced energy management systems can now automatically calculate and regulate energy consumption, production and storage across buildings to balance off-grid supply and demand during an outage. For example, they can ‘derate’ or reduce the output of onsite renewable or diesel generators to avoid overcharging batteries or practice ‘load shedding’, reducing power consumption to conserve electricity. The same smart control systems enable microgrids to seamlessly switch between the optimal power sources at all times, such as controlling and connecting to diesel generator sets when solar generation stops at night.
Digital measurement tools can automatically synchronise voltage and frequency levels with those of the main grid, enabling buildings to seamlessly reconnect to the grid after an outage without any voltage or frequency fluctuations. This also helps safeguard customers against any frequency fluctuations emanating from the grid.
These systems not only boost resilience but help plug gaps in electric grid infrastructure and thus accelerate the energy transition while the main grid is being expanded. One EV charging operator combined onsite solar PVs with our battery energy storage systems to provide fully off-grid power for 39 EV charging stations, creating a secure local power supply for electric transport and bringing ultra-fast EV chargers to places without network connections.
Towards an ‘edge electricity’ model
Just as the ‘edge computing’ model of distributed data storage helped safeguard the digital economy from data outages, a model of ‘edge electricity’ based around onsite energy management, storage, and production could transform economic resilience. Building owners could use advanced modelling to size and scale battery energy storage systems to their future energy needs and generating capacity, providing a secure and future-proof power supply. We could also see ‘resilience-as-a-service’ models offering more flexible, affordable energy security for smaller commercial and industrial facilities.
Beyond resilience, there are also many commercial benefits to intelligently managing, storing and producing power onsite. Companies could harness smart islanding systems to take advantage of price schemes that reward major industrial and commercial consumers for reducing peak-time power consumption, transforming resilience into revenue. Storing surplus power onsite also enables ‘peak shaving’, strategically charging and discharging batteries to reduce peak-time consumption and thus electricity costs.
Surplus power can even be sold back to the grid to provide essential functions from flexibility to frequency regulation, creating a virtuous circle where decentralised resilience for large consumers, in turn, provides improved stability and flexibility for the whole network. Some utilities pay BESS operators to help stabilise grid frequencies and operate other ancillary services like voltage regulation, creating a potential revenue source for commercial and industrial building owners and helping the grid.
Commercial buildings can also be paid to sell power back to the grid and provide stabilisation when the grid is under strain such as from extreme temperatures during summer. This means a BESS resiliency solution can effectively pay for itself, providing both behind-the-meter cost savings and commercial front-of-the-meter services for utility companies.
Recent events in Europe have highlighted the need to future-proof electric grids against a more unstable renewable energy landscape. Yet, ultimately, the transition to decentralised renewable energy sources will require a parallel shift towards decentralised resilience so that electric grids cease to be a single point of failure for the economy.
