Green the Flex: Achieving significant greenhouse gas emission reductions by intelligent electricity load shifting on the customer level.

2026-07-22

In Austria and many other European countries, the energy system is just before a major transition towards 100% renewable generation. Since renewable generation is not only seasonal but also short-term fluctuating and hard to predict we need to harmonise the electricity demand with the generation, both time-wise and region-wise. Flexibility is the ability to do exactly that by managing and optimising decentralised units. Based on the business plan we want to aggregate more than 2500 decentralised units in three years and use them for ancillary services, making more than 6 MW of power and more than 5 GWh/a short term load shift potential accessible to our energy system as flexibility. We are aiming for smaller, mostly residential units like heat pumps, electric car charging stations, hot water generation, and storage systems. Our goal is to provide easy to use applications for customers to match their demand to the behind the meter generation and enable them to directly participate on the energy markets by delivering flexibility with their devices. Additionally, we will adopt and use our systems to support Energy Communities once the respective law is passed in Austria. The most challenging flexibility services markets in terms of technical requirements are the ancillary services of Frequency Containment Reserve and Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve. By scaling our solution and pooling more than 2500 customers within the next three years we want to open those two markets for customer flexibility. The flexibility can be activated within seconds. With the link between citizens and energy markets not only the electricity system gets supported but also CO2-emissions are going to be reduced. The fund enables scaling up customers' load shifting potential to a relevant size. This creates a win-win-win situation, for the customers, EVN, cyberGRID, Fronius, tiko and, foremost, the environment.

Austria

2025-10-15