Greentech TransnetBW power grid electricity pylon lake
Anyone who wants to adapt their electricity consumption to times when Baden-Württemberg has a particularly large amount of electricity from renewable energies can receive information on their smartphone. Since November, the transmission system operator TransnetBW has been providing information about phases known as “supergreen” using the “StromGedacht” app the following day. “When private households or companies shift their planned consumption into a “super green” phase, they protect the climate and are economically efficient,” said a spokesman in Stuttgart.
Greentech app has been downloaded 275,500 times so far
According to him, the app had been downloaded around 275,500 times by March 26th. It notifies you via push notification when it makes sense to adjust power consumption. The app is intended to encourage people to move planned electricity consumption into a “super green” phase, said the spokesman. Therefore, this year we will focus primarily on these periods. “However, it is not about fundamentally encouraging people to save electricity.”TrendingGreentech.LIVE Conference April 25-27, 2024 (Spring Edition)
Energy saving app: It started with warnings
Since its launch in 2022, the app originally warned in particular of impending tense situations in the power grid. Users were asked not to run washing machines or charge laptop batteries during these periods – unless this was absolutely necessary. According to forecasts, in these phases marked red in the app, more electricity will be demanded in Baden-Württemberg than generated.
Since power generation and power consumption must always be in balance, this is then supplemented with electricity from abroad and from reserve power plants, for example. This network congestion management is called “redispatch” in specialist circles.
Because private households reportedly account for around a quarter of our electricity consumption, private individuals can make an important contribution to easing the load on the electricity grid by saving electricity or shifting their own consumption.
Smartphone app saves energy and money: automatically adapts power consumption to the network status
There is a free data interface (API) for companies and smart home users. This should, for example, make it possible to automatically adapt your own electricity consumption to the network status. Furthermore, to ensure the stability of the power grid, the lighting in the buildings could be reduced and energy-intensive processes could be moved to another time, the company explained.
“We cannot currently measure who takes devices off the network,” explained the spokesman. TransnetBW does not receive any measured values directly from households, for example from so-called smart meters – intelligent electricity meters, and in the interests of data economy it hardly requests any data from app and API users. According to the statements, a study currently being carried out should help to estimate the effect.
However, there is a trend: During an orange phase, which indicates a network bottleneck, on March 10, 2024, more than 13,000 users indicated their participation in the app with a “thumbs up”. According to the spokesman, that was almost twice as many as when the orange was triggered in September 2023 (7,000).