Putting Digital Circuit Breakers at the Centre of the Smart Grid

ended

Problem The integration of more renewable energy into the grid, creating highly variable, unpredictable and distributed energy production, uneven load and peak demand and transmission losses create significant challenges for utilities to effectively guarantee energy supply. Despite the investing billions of euros in Smart Meters, it is clear they are not the solution. They only collect limited amounts of data for the utility, do not give households greater control of their energy use, and cannot implement demand side management. Solution – Bl!xt DigiBreaker DigiBreaker turns your fuse box into a smartphone, collecting and communicating rich, real time electricity usage data as it passes through the circuit breaker. All the time while maintaining the core function of a circuit breaker, which is to interrupt current flow when there is a fault in the system. DigiBreaker breaks 1000 times faster and is more secure than the mechanical devices. DigiBreaker offers the following functionality: • Enables remote demand side management for the utility. • Direct two-way communication between the utility and the household. • An integrated controller that measures and collects detailed energy usage. • Can be controlled remotely via smart phone or computer. Project The aim of the phase 1 project is to improve our understanding of the value DigiBreaker holds for our target customer and clearly map out the route to market. In phase 2 we envisage to scale up the technology, establish a strategy for compliance in Europe, run pilots with utilities and build a commercial and operational strategic plan to demonstrate these aspects to utilities on a large scale. Impact & Market We estimate that DigiBreakers could replace traditional circuit breakers and fuses, which will have an estimated market size of over 27 billion € by 2020. Reaching 5% of this market by 2025 would provide us with returns of over 60M€ and an IRR of 81%.