Multi-Site Optimisation

Businesses are increasingly adopting renewable energy and storage systems to power their operations and secure energy independence. This shift goes beyond carbon reduction — it’s a strategic move that offers many advantages, including long-term cost savings and enhanced energy security.

For companies with multiple locations, multi-site optimisation presents a powerful opportunity to enhance these benefits. Advanced digital technologies enable seamless sharing of energy generation and storage across sites, transforming clean energy management into a competitive advantage.

At Joulen, we have developed the smart platform PARIS to optimise businesses’ multi-site energy assets. Our AI-driven software empowers companies to take control of energy management, maximising their renewable generation across their portfolio of sites. This approach means renewable investments are fully leveraged to unlock significant financial and environmental gains.

A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a sophisticated network that connects decentralised, small-scale energy resources, such as solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, wind turbines, and battery storage systems. Advanced software such as PARIS manages these resources, which allows them to function collectively as a single power plant. By aggregating and coordinating these various energy sources, a VPP optimises energy generation, distribution, and consumption in real-time, ensuring a balanced and efficient energy flow.

A key component of multi-site optimisation involves aggregating battery storage across multiple locations. This allows for efficient energy distribution across all sites, providing a significant opportunity to reduce capacity requirements and minimise exposure to electricity price volatility.

Balancing energy generation and consumption between multiple sites is another crucial aspect to optimise resource utilisation and enhance efficiencies. Sites often have varying energy profiles: one location might generate excess solar energy during peak sunlight hours, while another has higher energy demands at the same time. Advanced technologies can determine the optimal time to share energy between sites, which in practice would fully capitalise on fluctuating grid costs alongside broader financial opportunities.

The benefits of this system are significant. By synergising energy use across sites, companies can enhance grid stability and reliability, maximise the use of renewable energy, reduce energy costs and emissions, and unlock new revenue streams through energy trading and grid services. This dynamic system ensures that energy infrastructure is used to its fullest potential, maximising return on investment and improving the reliability of energy supply business-wide.

At Joulen, we provide comprehensive support to businesses looking to synergise multi-site renewable energy systems. Our PARIS system combines advanced forecasting, intelligent optimisation, automated trading, and intuitive control interfaces to maximise the value and efficiency of renewable technologies. The platform is designed to optimise every unit generated across your clean technology assets, making your energy work for you.

Maximising your energy potential begins with a deep understanding of your energy needs. Machine learning enables our PARIS Forecasting Engine to predict individual site generation, consumption, market demands, and income opportunities every 15 minutes of the day.  

PARIS comprehensively views all your energy assets, mapping out opportunities and creating a tailored asset optimisation plan. Using the same technology found in financial trading software, our AI-powered system makes smart decisions on when to store, use and release energy across multiple sites. This ensures that every energy asset is utilised to its full potential, enhancing efficiency and financial returns.

PARIS identifies and leverages all available revenue opportunities for your energy assets. Our intelligent system stacks these opportunities, trading your assets across various energy markets to diversify and enhance your revenue streams, ensuring you maximise every opportunity.

PARIS seamlessly controls your assets, managing energy flows to drive profitability through enhanced efficiency. Our system optimises every aspect of renewable energy management, ensuring that your business extracts the maximum possible value from its investments.

Joulen supported a large farming cooperative to identify the benefits of optimising energy use across its network of farms, retail outlets, and factories using the PARIS platform. The project began with a comprehensive data analysis across all sites to identify potential savings from optimised self-generation of PV solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage systems, as well as potential revenues from network services.

In Stage 1, the independent operation of generation and storage assets at each site projected total net savings of €16.4 million – a 30% cost reduction. This was achieved through opportunities for individual sites to reduce their grid consumption by 10% and up to 89%. Stage 2 introduced energy sharing between sites, yielding an additional €2 million in savings and a further 9% reduction in grid consumption. This energy sharing was optimised by the integration of a community with a shared electricity contract and power purchase agreement (PPA) agreement for excess generation.

This project demonstrated the substantial benefits of multi-site optimisation and the viability of large-scale energy optimisation across diverse networks. Enabled by the PARIS platform, these lasting financial and environmental gains showcase the significant opportunities that smart, clean energy systems offer to multi-site businesses. 

Any business can benefit from multi-site optimisation. To significantly reduce your energy costs, open doors to new revenue streams, and meet your decarbonisation goals, Joulen is here to help your business thrive.