VERBUND presents sustainable solutions for the energy future at European Utility Week 2018

Green hydrogen for industry, mobility and energy stores

In an increasingly renewable energy system, green hydrogen will play a central role. The use of green hydrogen as an industrial material, as a future fuel for sustainable mobility as well as for the storage of energy to offset the volatile generation of electricity from the new, renewable energies, is currently undergoing testing. VERBUND is working on this topic in a range of projects. The project H2FUTURE generates green hydrogen for the steel industry. It replaces coke and coal as reducing agents. Apart from producing green hydrogen, the electrolyser is also used for grid-related services. The project is also investigating the extent to which the concept can be transferred to other industrial sectors, such as chemicals, oil & gas or fertilisers. Furthermore, the use of hydrogen as a future fuel for sustainable mobility is being advanced in cooperation with the Zillertal transport companies. 

SYNERG-E – Use of local battery storage systems

Green hydrogen also offers great potential for the storage of energy, in order to offset the volatile generation of electricity from the new, renewable energies. As the transition to renewable sources of energy becomes increasingly dynamic, the ability to store energy is growing more and more important. Energy stores will also play a key role in electromobility. Not only in vehicles but also in charging stations. Ultra-fast charging needs an enormous amount of power and energy in a very short space of time. In the short term, this exerts high loads on the local electricity grid and also causes high costs. To avoid this, VERBUND uses the knowledge acquired from a wide range of areas and optimises the use of local buffer stores to smooth out peak loads and to create flexibility on the balancing energy market in the EU-funded project SYNERG-E. 
Visionary platform for large customers
VISION is the central communications and service portal for VERBUND’s large customers such as public utility companies, industrial facilities and remote wind and PV generators. The platform connects internal processes with the interactions with the customers, thereby creating highly efficient, automated work procedures.  In terms of “One face to the customer”, VISION provides customers with the bundled sales and trading offer of VERBUND, including all processes and full processing, in an easy-to-use tool.

Digital power plant

The glass hydroelectric power plant, interactive troubleshooting and digitalised predictive diagnostics of systems and components - these are the building blocks of the hydropower future. Digitalisation does not stop at hydroelectric power, which has been tried and tested for over 100 years. Even in the past, VERBUND – as the biggest domestic user of hydropower – was a pioneer in the automation and computer-assisted control of systems. What was still groundbreaking a few decades ago, such as the full remote control of all power plants on the Danube, is today a tried-and-tested standard. With digitalisation, VERBUND is taking the next important step to raise the high efficiency and reliability of hydropower to the next level. The goal is to precisely identify the current condition for the most important power plant components in a kind of “glass power plant”, in order to forecast possible failures on time and thereby avoid unwanted damage.

Our society is heading towards becoming an all-electric society. VERBUND works intensively on technical and economical solutions for a safe, affordable and environmentally friendly energy supply. The leading Austrian power company thus makes an important contribution to decarbonisation, stabilisation of the electricity grid and at the same time to supply reliability.