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ABB?s OPTIMAX? solutions aim at energy costs reduction

Kevin Kosisko is the managing director at ABB power generation and water. (Image source: ABB)

The new OPTIMAX? solution from ABB helps enable industrial, commercial and power generation companies to reduce energy costs and site emissions by optimising the aggregation and dispatch of energy sources

These offerings aim to help large, energy-intensive companies that are increasingly looking for new ways to reduce energy costs and emissions.

During the installation of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as wind and solar, the energy-intensive companies often lack capabilities to reduce energy cost and site emissions because they may not adequately measure, monitor or control their energy use.

A part of the ABB Ability? Energy Management, OPTIMAX? aims to solve these problems by connecting to the distributed energy resources and optimising their use to achieve reduced energy cost and emissions.

?The energy and grid transformation is driving changes in how electricity is being generated, transported and consumed, with bi-directional energy and information flow having accelerated in the past couple of years,? said Kevin Kosisko, managing director at ABB power generation and water.

For industrial and commercial companies that actively manage their power consumption and resources, OPTIMAX? provides with the opportunity to trade more efficiently with the grid while optimising their own power consumption and resources, reducing energy costs and minimising environmental impact.

In addition, OPTIMAX? also allows users to monitor energy use by adding new generation assets into a virtual power pool and aggregating decentralised generation and flexible loads.

?This aggregation and pooling of assets allow for seamless collection, management and reporting of environmental data related to energy use. The result is that users can automate the operation of their generation assets, controllable loads and/or storage to achieve an energy cost reduction of three to five per cent. Additionally, these sites can actively participate in energy markets and demand response schemes,? explained Kosisko.

?For those users with control of grid-connected assets, such as vertically integrated utilities, cities and aggregators, OPTIMAX? for virtual power plants coordinates control of networked generation assets by creating a virtual power plant. The operation of each connected unit and the delivery of grid services are economically optimised in real time given system constraints. OPTIMAX? for virtual power plants allows for integrated planning, trading, operating, monitoring, and reporting of power plants, generation units, energy storages and controllable loads.?

The new digital solution can also be supported through ABB Ability? collaborative operations, providing access to ABB controls and performance experts that can perform system maintenance, optimisation and expansion.

Kosisko concluded, ?Increasingly corporations publicly communicate ambitions to minimise carbon impact and they use energy consumption as a key lever to attain this goal. This new solution reflects ABB?s aspiration of enabling a cleaner planet by making sustainable operations more accessible and scalable.?