The power of many
My Power Plant
Betreiber steht vor seinem Notstromaggregat mit welchem er Regelenergie über das Virtuelle Kraftwerk von Next Kraftwerke bereitstellt.

Additional revenues: You achieve attractive revenues with your emergency generator and thus turn a cost factor into a source of income.

Service-oriented: We take care of the connection of your emergency power to the virtual power plant and carry out the test procedure for the control energy, the prequalification, for you.

Safety: Your genset continues to serve its primary function, of course. Emergency operation always takes precedence over control energy calls.

Restrictions: You can also limit the operating hours of your genset to a defined call time per year.

Tertiary reserve capacity balances the fluctuations of the network after a delay of 15 minutes. The TSO measures the frequency and places commands to call capacities. In order to this, your genset(s) have to react latest 15 minutes after the activation signal. As most emergency gensets have a starting time of only a few seconds this should be no problem. The network operator Elia buys two different mFRR products: R3 standard and R3 flex. The first can be activated for up to 8 hours per day, while the second can be activated for maximum 2 hours continuously – between two activations there has to be a pause of at least 12 hours. The grid operator pays a capacity fee for both products, but only the R3 standard entitles the grid operator to an energy fee.
Notstromaggregat Dortmund

Calls: You can be notified about reserve power calls of your emergency generator.

Fault notification: In the event of faults, you will also receive notifications via the app on request.

Maintenance times: You can conveniently register maintenance and repair times via the portal.

The basic prerequisite for integrating the system is grid parallelism. This means that the emergency generator must be connected in parallel to the power grid so that it can feed into the distribution grid. In addition, a genset should have an output of at least 250 kW, or even better 350 kW, so that integration into the Next Pool is worthwhile for you.

The basic principle for connecting an emergency generator to the virtual power plant is that the emergency generator continues to serve its original purpose. The connection to the Next Pool is merely an opportunity to generate revenues where previously there were only costs. The remote control unit is switched in such a way that emergency operation always has priority over control energy calls. However, the operator can also intervene manually at any time. If the operator can foresee the use of the emergency generator, this must be reported and a control energy call must be excluded for the corresponding time.

In order to sell the capacity of your genset successfully on the reserve power market, a connection to the Virtual Power Plant via the Next Box is necessary. If the transmission system operator activates a certain amount of reserve capacity, our control system automatically determines the best operating plan and schedules the systems in the Next Pool accordingly. The Next Box is your link to the virtual power plant. Communication between your genset plant and our control system takes place via a secure mobile connection that meets a legally prescribed requirement for the telecontrol capacity of a plant. The Next Box also enables you to operate your system according to a price-based scheme, which opens up additional trading opportunities.

No, in principle no bottlenecks are to be expected in fuel supply, as call-offs are usually quite short (usually only a few minutes per call-off). In addition, at times when longer call-offs are expected, which usually occurs during holidays such as Easter and Christmas, the maximum duration of the call-offs can be limited by the control system.

Aggregated Units

16 769Q4/2023

Networked Capacity

13 500MW Q4 2023

Volume of traded energy

15.1TWh in 2023

Employees

328

Locations

9

Foundation

2009Next Pool
Gensets