The article originally published on realty.ria.ru

Photo credit: © RIA Novosti / Alexey Sukhorukov

Moscow, 1 July — Ria Novosti. Small and medium consumers can lower their energy bills and receive payments from the energy market for reducing consumption at certain times; the respective pilot projects are starting in Russia on the 1st of July.

The savings will come from reducing power consumption at certain hours and shifting it to a different time. For example, much more energy is consumed during the daytime than at night. There are also morning and evening consumption peaks — when everyone gets up in the morning or returns home from the office in the evening, turning on various electric appliances. Additional generating capacities need to be engaged to supply power at these peak hours, which would remain idle most of the day. If peak consumption continues to grow, new power generating stations may need to be built, with the costs ultimately falling on the public.

At the same time, some consumers might choose to use their electrical appliances earlier or later, smoothing out the peaks, and get compensated by the energy market. This would be beneficial to the grid companies and the consumers alike, so we got the idea of developing pilot projects to try and spread out electricity consumption peaks. The government passed a decree authorizing these pilot projects in March 2019. They will be implemented starting July this year and continue until the end of 2020.

For now, only small and medium-sized business consumers will be able to participate in the projects. Oleg Grinko, co-director of EnergyNet Workgroup, Director T-Sistema JOINT STOCK COMPANY, says ordinary city residents will be able to benefit from the new scheme no earlier than 2021.

The main decision to involve small and medium-sized consumers in these projects in the global practice is the establishment of special aggregator companies that unite several consumers. In June, “Systems Operator”, the operator of Russia’s united energy systems, selected 20 aggregator companies to take part in the pilot project. They will participate in the project until 30 September, before being replaced by the winners of the next contest round. The first consumers selected for the pilot project are offices, agricultural enterprises, food, machine-building and oil-and-gas industry enterprises.

For the pilot projects, aggregators would be paid about 85,000 rubles a year for every 10 kW saved. Grinko explains this would effectively mean 15–20% electricity cost savings.

“The aggregator is the intermediary between (electric energy — editor) providers, from which it receives power and payment for consumption reduction, and consumers, to which it pays for change in energy consumption patterns. The consumer’s revenue will depend on the amount of energy stripped from top-consumption period and the duration of shift, roughly about 500,000 rubles per Megawatt of energy”, Alexander Borodich, founder of Universa Blockchain platform, commented to RIA Novosti.