A thousand Fortum customers' homes form a one-megawatt virtual battery

FORTUM CORPORATION 22 January 2018

By utilising demand response, Fortum's Spring -venture has built a one-megawatt virtual battery with the help of one thousand of its consumer customers. The growing virtual battery will play an increasingly important role in maintaining energy system balance.

Household water heaters are running at night-time, but they can now be momentarily switched off. This has no impact on living comfort or on the heating of tap water, but it has a big significance in balancing the load of the national grid.

Consumers play a big role in the energy system transformation. The IEA estimates that by 2040 as many as one billion households and 11 billion smart household appliances will be actively participating on electricity markets.

“We definitely want to be part of this development together with our customers. We have made demand response a commercial activity, and we have quickly succeeded in putting together a real-time reserve of one thousand consumer customers – which is significant also on a global scale. We are in a great position to move forward,” says Janne Happonen, CEO of Spring by Fortum.

Energy system transformation and enabling renewable energy production through demand response are at the core of Fortum’s strategy. Sector digitalisation and new customer-centric business models create new opportunities in the midst of the transformation. Last year, for example, Fortum commissioned a 2-megawatt Batcave battery in conjunction with the Järvenpää power plant.

Fortum Corporation
Group Communications

Further information:
Janne Happonen, CEO, Spring by Fortum, tel. +358 50 357 6337

www.spring.energy
Spring by Fortum video: https://youtu.be/Tc0NBIGGGtI

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