Developments in distributed generation

Prosumer, smart grid and digital energy: towards a flexible energy system

The spread of thousands of small generation plants across the Italian electricity grid, such as photovoltaic panels installed on residential rooftops, alongside traditional power plants, has significantly changed the way the system is managed. This new paradigm, known as distributed generation, can offer greater opportunities for managing one’s own energy independently.

What does distributed energy generation mean?

In its glossary, ENEA defines distributed generation as a decentralised electricity production system based on various small-scale sources. In this scenario, citizens are no longer just consumers, but become active players in the energy market. “Prosumer” is the term coined to describe consumers who are also producers. “Prosumage” represents its evolution, defining a prosumer equipped with storage systems.

Distributed generation and smart grids

Distributed generation is progressively transforming the national energy landscape, driving an evolution in the way electricity grids are managed. The traditional centralised and programmable generation system is now being complemented by a growing number of small production units spread across the territory. This integration brings new challenges for the infrastructure, due to the often non-programmable nature of renewable sources, which are closely linked to weather conditions and seasonality. Smart grids are essential for managing this new complexity. These intelligent networks are designed to optimise both distributed generation and, more broadly, interconnected electricity microgrids. Thanks to this infrastructure, an increasing number of users have the opportunity to produce energy locally and manage its flows dynamically.

Smart grids can facilitate the integration of traditional energy production with energy generated by small and medium-sized plants, both public and private. In this system, where different plants contribute to production and storage, the development of energy communities is encouraged, allowing locally produced energy to be shared and managed collaboratively.

Distributed generation, integrated with smart grids and digital energy, contributes to the development of increasingly connected and digitalised cities and homes, supporting better energy management from the perspective of the progressive electrification of consumption. This transformation opens up new possibilities: by producing part of their energy from renewable sources, users can actively contribute to the energy transition. In addition, self-production and self-consumption offer the opportunity to optimise withdrawals from the electricity grid, enabling users to manage their energy spending in a way that is more consistent with their consumption habits.

Flexibility: enabling the benefits of distributed generation

To fully harness the potential of distributed generation and smart grids, and to manage the intrinsic intermittency of renewable sources, flexibility becomes an essential factor. It is not just an abstract concept, but a concrete capability of the energy system to adapt, in real time, to fluctuations in production and consumption. This can be imagined as an orchestra where every instrument, from production plants and consumers to storage systems, must play in harmony, even when the rhythm suddenly changes. This “harmony” is ensured by flexibility, which can come from different sources: the modulation of production from traditional plants, the management of industrial loads, or the activation of distributed resources such as home batteries and electric vehicles.

Balancing Service Providers (BSPs), or energy aggregators such as Plenitude, coordinate these resources to offer flexibility services to the grid. Several innovative projects are currently underway to explore the different forms of flexibility. These involve the industrial sector, smart buildings, the residential context and electric mobility: read the dedicated article here. To make this “orchestra” operational and manage flexibility efficiently, digital energy solutions come into play, providing the digital infrastructure needed to monitor and coordinate the different connected resources.

Distributed generation and digital energy

The digitalisation of energy consists of integrating intelligent technologies across the entire value chain, from generation to end use. The main objective is to optimise consumption in order to progressively increase overall efficiency, while enabling new advanced solutions for everyday management, comfort and safety. At infrastructure level, this translates into the monitoring of distribution through hardware and software systems capable of collecting and processing large volumes of aggregated data using cloud architectures. At the same time, in the home environment, digital energy offers the opportunity to monitor the production, storage and consumption of one’s home in near real time. This makes it possible to manage demand peaks through dynamic control logic that balances sources, storage and loads, an approach known as Demand Side Management. One of the features of this ecosystem is the possibility of personalising certain functions, tailored to users’ needs and daily habits. Concrete examples include the intelligent scheduling of household appliances, optimised according to time bands, or the synergy between energy flows and home automation and security systems.
Technologies such as photovoltaics, storage systems and IoT (Internet of Things), working together, can contribute to a more integrated management of domestic energy flows. At the same time, these solutions are changing our relationship with energy and making tangible the new way of thinking outlined by distributed generation, which promotes an increasingly active role for the prosumer.