Individual self-consumption has been seen to be particularly competitive in the industrial sector, in which more and more large companies choose to produce their own energy to reduce the costs associated with their electricity consumption and emissions derived from their productive activity. Making progress towards collective self-consumption models allows several consumers to share the cost of the same generation plant, reducing the initial investment and individual risks. This opens up the self-consumption market to a wider range of industries and companies located on industrial estates that may not have the resources or space required to undertake a renewable energy generation project on their own.

The global collective self-consumption market is an emerging one in an initial phase, with less than 100 MW of installed capacity in projects concentrated in Australia, Switzerland, France and Germany, hotspots with favourable regulation that are currently leading the deployment of this new model.

Spain is making progress towards the definition of an administrative, technical and economic framework to regulate the national self-consumption market. ACCIONA, with its distributed generation solutions for self-consumption from renewable energies, has the capability to play a major role in the transformation of the present energy model.

The evolution of the regulatory framework on energy self-consumption in Spain opens up opportunities for the development of the collective self-consumption market. To develop and consolidate this market, it is essential to deploy new models of energy generation and consumption, from the perspective of exploitation of energy sources that are profitable in terms of maximising the economic value of a generation plant.

Collective industrial self-consumption poses a series of challenges to the operational structure of a facility: how the energy generated is shared out among offtakers (adapting to each one’s consumption profiles), how their real consumption is traced, how the energy generated and self-consumption is maximised, how it is planned, how it is managed and how surpluses are capitalised are some of the challenges to be addressed that have a direct impact on the functioning and technical/financial performance of plants. Having tools to monitor and manage these aspects will enable the design and operation of distributed resources to maximise the added value offered to shareholders.

ACCIONA launches this challenge to identify platforms for the management of collective industrial self-consumption plants that allow the optimisation of the generation and consumption model associated to the plant, with the aim of maximising its performance and profitability. The following factors will be taken into account in the proposed solutions:

• The inclusion of predictive algorithms for the plant’s generation.
• Monitoring of monthly consumption (by time band) of each offtaker, to improve accuracy when defining distribution coefficients.
• Monitoring of surpluses produced by the plant that are injected into the grid.
• Provision of granular and aggregate information on the technical and economic functioning and performance of the plant in real time. If the proposed solution includes research and the testing of new business models this will be taken into account.