Utility Management System

Energy21 applies expertise and best practices derived from the energy sector to the energy intensive industry. Software platform EBASE is designed to handle large data flows for different stakeholders in the energy market: producers, grid operators, balance responsible parties and suppliers. Similar market processes take place on integrated industrial sites, i.e. planning, operation and settlement/reporting of energy and utility flows between assets. By bringing together data from every relevant source, efficiencies can be found across multiple utility streams.

• Provides energy managers the best possible picture of expected energy demand, available production units, market prices and contractual constraints.
• Ensures a reliable flow of data that directly translates to the operation.
• Advanced forecasts of electricity, gas, steam, and other utility consumption to reduce imbalance risk.
• Real-time insight into the imbalance market and flexible assets to support the electricity grid.
• Enables managing an increasingly complex energy ecosystem fueled by the energy transition.

EBASE has three application layers, which are complementary, but each have a substantially different function:

1. The core layer ensures fast and reliable handling of incoming data, plus the automated execution of validation and calculation steps.
2. The sector layer contains standard modules that are relevant to specific sectors, such as the energy-intensive industry. These provide a solid basis for carrying out the most important energy processes.
3. The customer layer offers the possibility to develop customized solutions that fit exactly how customer-specific energy processes are set up.

• Integrated industrial sites with energy-intensive processes (e.g. chemistry and petrochemicals)

Applying digitalization at larger, complex industrial sites creates the ability to steer on energy operations near real time. This proven technology can lead to energy savings and efficiencies in (e.g.) steam production, reduce emissions and exploit synergies. (This technology has been applied in a full-scale implementation and calculated with a model calculation, a process for empirical validation runs as well).

Advanced forecasts of electricity and gas consumption reduce imbalance risk. At the moment we are already seeing outliers in imbalance prices that can cause significant costs. It is expected that an increase in renewable electricity on the grid will make these outliers more frequent and increase imbalance costs in the future. (Validated with model calculation).

By creating real-time insight into the imbalance market, flexible assets can be used to support the electricity grid. In this case, the above mentioned outliers in the imbalance price can be used as an opportunity. (Validated with model calculation).

• Reduced gas consumption:
  • 60-120 tons CO₂/MW_th/yr
  • 5,000-15,000 €/MW_th/yr, commodity + CO₂ duties

• Auditable and compliant to market regulations and protocols which allows staff to focus on optimization
• Income from the imbalance market and ancillary services (20,000-40,000 €/MW_e/yr)

• BASF, Antwerp