Flexibility Services

New Zealand’s decarbonisation goals require electrification of transport and process heat driving demand for new generation up by over 60% by 2050.

To achieve our electrification goals, we need to engage with owners of distributed energy resources and seek the use of their generation (PV, micro-wind & hydro) and stored energy (home batteries and EVs) to optimise the use of the electricity grid and limit over-investment in infrastructure that will cost the nation (through each consumer) dearly.

Cortexo provides a cloud software platform to flexibility service providers (Aggregators) or flexibility users (Utilities) to integrate distributed energy resources into the electricity supply chain to allow for the provision of services such as

• Energy arbitrage – the value that could be captured by buying and storing electricity when it is offered at low cost on the market and selling it back into the market when demand is highest
• Resource adequacy – through peak shaving and demand shaping
• Instantaneous reserve – provision of generation held in reserve or of interruptible load in order to halt a decline in system frequency caused by an unexpected supply interruption.
• Frequency keeping – the service required to manage short term supply and demand imbalances to ensure that the system frequency is maintained in each island within a normal band
• Voltage stability – management of voltage to enable network capacity or deliver electricity to consumers to an acceptable quality.
• Inertia – providing shock absorption when a disturbance in the power system causes a rapid change in system frequency.

The Cortexo energy platform provides visibility of available resources and the ability to communicate utility needs through open international standard protocols such as openADR. Direct control of distributed energy resources can be provided using IEEE2030.5

Our History

Cortexo has been working in the area of demand response and remote control of distributed energy for over 20 years. 

Some examples are

• Control of home solar diversion controllers to optimise solar use for the home and network using openADR 2.0a
• Control of diesel generators and large load for demand response signaled by the national grid operator Transpower
• Control of in-home devices through smart meters and ZigBee connectivity using SEP 2.0, the precursor to IEEE2030.5 
• Optimisation of generation from a privately owned 4MW hydro generation

Industry Participation

Cortexo is also involved in the New Zealand electricity industry through active participation in industry groups such as;

• The Electricity Authorities Innovation and Participation Advisory Group (IPAG)
• The cross industry FlexForum, designing the flexibility market for New Zealand
• The Sustainable Energy Association of New Zealand
• The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) and Electricity Engineers Association (EEA) project on “DR Open Protocols” 

International Standards Organisations

Cortexo is involved with the following international standards working groups

• The openADR Alliance “Profile Update” working group (contributor)
• The IEEE 2030.5 & CSIP-AU Standards Group (Observer)