adesso Blog

Conventional power plants, such as nuclear or coal-fired power plants, still provide a large portion of the system services in the electricity grid these days, for example frequency maintenance. Our blog post about the VideKIS research project will reveal how these system services should also be provided using renewable energy sources in future.

The energy industry can look back on a turbulent year. In addition to technical challenges, such as the sluggish headway made with the smart meter rollout, there were two main topics that dominated the year: climate change and the war in Ukraine. In this blog post, we would like to provide a year in review and present you with a final overview of the energy industry’s 2022 fiscal year.

Sustainability is the megatrend of our time, and measures to increase sustainability are the talk of the town. However, in order to make improvements and evaluate them correctly, we first need to know where we stand. Unfortunately, when it comes to sustainability, there is still a bit of uncertainty and far too often greenwashing is employed. Therefore in this blog post, we will take a look at what we know about evaluating digital sustainability and where there are still uncertainties.

The German Government is using the price cap for electricity as part of the €300 billion economic ‘defence shield’ in an attempt to cushion the rising costs for consumers in Germany. This blog post will describe what the price cap is, how the financing is supposed to work and whether it entails as many benefits as promised.

A virtual power plant is an association of decentralised units that are coordinated via a common control system. The purpose of a virtual power plant is to sell the electricity and flexibility provided by the large network of aggregated installations through a single source. This blog post will explain where this idea originated and how it can be used in the energy transition.

Robert Habeck, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, announced a restart of the rollout on 20 October 2022. In order to remove the legal and bureaucratic hurdles, a package of measures is to be developed and presented together with the industry that will significantly accelerate and simplify the rollout. We reveal what the new start looks like in our blog post.

The electricity and gas crisis is at its peak. Reason enough for the German federal government to now take drastic measures to cushion the impact of the geostrategic conflict. On 29 September 2022, the government presented an energy aid package worth €200 billion. This blog post will explain what this astronomical energy aid package covers.

One solution to mitigate the energy crisis in Germany is its Ordinance on Securing the Energy Supply via Measures Effective in the Short Term (Verordnung über kurzfristige Energieeinsparmaßnahmen, EnSikuMaV). The purpose of the ordinance is to implement short-term energy-saving measures, particularly in residential and non-residential buildings. These regulations affect public enterprises, the energy, real estate and tourism industries as well as trade. We will explain the specifics of what this entails in our blog post.

In July 2022, an amendment to the Energy Industry Act (Energiewirtschaftsgesetz, EnWG) laid the groundwork for reducing gas consumption in the electricity sector, this being done in the backdrop of an impending natural gas shortage. Sections 50a to 50e of the Act seek to increase the amount of electricity generated with coal and oil, while Sections 50f to 50h introduce measures to reduce the amount of electricity produced using gas and increase flexibility in gas supplies. But how can this be achieved?