Helping companies to reduce energy costs - Nano Energies Hrvatska starts providing services to first customers

After the successful gathering of the first block of users, Nano Energies, dedicated to optimizing the production and consumption of electricity for businesses together with balancing the grid, begins work in Croatia. The first customers are biogas and biomass  stations which are now part of their virtual power plant with an amount of almost 20 MW of  flexible electricity. 

“We can help our clients to reduce energy costs by 10-30%, without the need to transform their daily operations. Our customers normal operations are not affected because the whole process happens automatically. For companies that operate 24 hours a day and have variable energy consumption, cost savings can be even higher”, explains Dominik Marinčević, Nano Energies Hrvatska Country Manager.

The fundamental mechanism of the solution that Nano Energies introduces to the Croatian market is an aggregation of flexible energy assets, one of the key ways of effective energy management in times of crisis and uncertainty. In addition to smartly managing electricity consumption and production, it also helps in reducing operating costs. Nano Energies, using its own hardware and software, connects numerous smaller and larger producers and consumers of electricity into a centrally managed intelligent system. This system acts as one large virtual power plant and enables users to reduce overall costs while helping the national grid to stay in balance. This approach also helps to increase the adoption of more renewable sources of energy. This is important, since renewable energy production is variable, based on weather and without careful management generates imbalances in the electricity system.

In order for the electricity network to be stable, i.e. to prevent blackouts, the generation of electricity must always equal consumption. 

Nano Energies has developed its own software platform to enable communication with the dispatching systems of the Croatian Transmission system operator HOPS. This allows controlling and communicating with devices, combined together in the Nano Energies Croatia virtual power plant.The system remotely operates the energy assets when there is a need to balance the grid. 

One of the key users is Energija Gradec. As the largest biogas electricity producer in Croatia, the company accounts for one fifth of the country’s total production of that particular type of energy. With its five biogas plants, Energija Gradec is licensed to generate energy from its total installed capacity of 9.8 MW, and produces around 80,000 MWh of electricity annually.

“The biggest advantage of this partnership cooperation is the additional profit gained through the balancing of the electricity system any time there is an electricity surplus in the grid. To provide a grid-balancing response in such a situation, Nano Energies has our flexible capacities constantly at its disposal and is able to activate them, while disconnecting us from the grid for a maximum of two hours. Since we get paid for the period during which we are activated, i.e. we experience no downtime costs, this is a model that allows us to make additional savings and develop efficient plans. Accordingly, with the help of Nano Energies, we have made a significant step towards sustainable resource management,” concludes Krešimir Milorad, President of the Management Board of Energija Gradec.

HERA’s certification in the fall of 2021 enabled the company Nano Energies Hrvatska to be among the first to legally and completely enter the market of the Republic of Croatia and present the virtual power plant service. In simple terms, this means that it can remotely operate its customers’ equipment without being their electricity supplier.