Energy prices are skyrocketing at an unprecedented rate while the deployment of renewable sources of energy is booming. Chief Developer and CEO of Mondas, Christian Reetz, explains why a successful energy transition can only be achieved with a new approach to energy monitoring and what features today’s users expect from modern monitoring.
Mr. Reetz, basically every single industrial company, property management company, household and utility company is now trying to identify efficiency potentials, i.e. find ways to save energy. Where do you see potential?
The short answer is: Almost everywhere, actually. All energy technologies and applications, including modern ones, still have hidden and substantial efficiency potentials. For example, in non-residential buildings, where various control systems are often not properly coordinated. Or in CHP plants that are only used for peak demand, which reduces their service life. Or photovoltaic systems on green roofs that are slowly and steadily overgrown by plants without anyone noticing. In short: The efficient energy technology that everyone wants may have been installed, but it’s not running as efficiently as it could. Modern Mondas-style monitoring is a fast and cost-effective option to unlock this potential.
How exactly would you define “modern power plant monitoring”?
Well, so far, monitoring of energy plants has mainly been concerned with remote technical monitoring. There are commercial operation management companies that control monitored systems and check their operating status. Whenever an anomaly occurs, operators receive an alarm ticket. This used to be enough because the number of systems that needed to be monitored was usually small. However, with the swift expansion of renewable energies, the situation is now fundamentally changing. The remote monitoring approach of the past won’t cut it anymore.
What’s different now and in the future?
The deployment of solar and wind power plants has been growing rapidly – and not just since the energy crisis. Today, operating companies monitor thousands of PV systems and CHP plants at once. Although conventional monitoring software still detects a fair number of critical operating statuses, the really relevant error messages often go unnoticed among the flood of less qualified messages. Or they need to be retrieved actively, meaning manually, by an employee. What we need is a sensible prioritization of alarm tickets, and we need more thorough and more targeted analyses as a basis for that prioritization.
Does that mean that the large number of decentralized energy plants requires more efficient monitoring?
Exactly. But that’s not the only reason – there’s another important aspect. Decentralized energy plants are no longer stand-alone systems. They are always part of highly complex local energy systems. Take a look at housing districts, for example. In our Grünheide energy district project, rooftop PV systems generate domestic electricity for the tenants, while also powering the heat pumps for the district. In addition, integrated battery storage systems balance out solar supply and demand. All of this needs to be optimized within the system. Conventional remote monitoring software won’t get you far here, because to optimize the interaction of individual components, next to the energy plants, you also need to keep an eye on the consumers.
Isn’t that already the standard?
Not at all. Today, every single PV system, storage and charging technology and CHP plant comes with its own proprietary monitoring solution. Neither planners nor operation management companies are able to collate the operational data, let alone analyze it. As a result, each of these systems sends its own alarm tickets, which makes identifying the cause extremely cumbersome. Error messages are often closed without reading, which can have disastrous consequences. For example, when a local power grid component, such as a buffer tank, fails. If this error goes undetected, it can have an extremely negative impact on the overall system’s efficiency. Which brings us back to the issue of hidden savings potentials.
What do you think it would take to make progress in this area?
We need a paradigm shift in monitoring energy plants today more than ever. A whole new approach to monitoring tasks. We need to move away from individual monitoring and towards operation optimization of decentralized energy systems. The potential savings in this area are huge. Take one of our model projects that involves a heat network supplied by waste heat.
Mondas implemented smart load management here. The operator estimates that the amount of waste heat that can be utilized as a result is around 10 percent. The savings potential for the residual heat supply is comparably high. We assume that the potential other waste heat supply systems is similar.
Mondas was established to unlock such potentials. How much progress have you made? Can you give us a brief interim conclusion?
I can tell you that we’ve done a lot of good work since our foundation. We have implemented pilot projects, some of which have won awards such as the German Energy Agency’s (dena) Energy Efficiency Award. We have used our field experience to enhance the performance of our mondas® IoT platform and make it more user-friendly. Today, four years on, we have a software solution that meets the requirements of modern power plant monitoring – or rather: system monitoring. The users are impressed.
What are mondas® users particularly impressed with?
First and foremost, it’s the ability to analyze and optimize different components of an energy system, for instance, photovoltaic systems along with connected heat pumps and battery storage systems, on one platform. What’s more, the platform’s data connectivity is excellent. It supports many fieldbuses and interfaces, for instance, BACnet in BSE or OPC UA of other systems.
An added bonus is Mondas’s high performance. Due to its special data base technology, it is capable of performing complex evaluations at top speed, even of very large amounts of data.
How user friendly is your software?
The work we have been doing on this over the past few months has been successful. Mondas users can configure the monitoring platform themselves using a graphical editor and carry out any analyses desired – and no software skills are needed. We deliver the platform with an extensive rule library, which the customer can expand and tailor to their needs as they see fit. The package also includes templates with which dashboards and analyses can be configured to specific applications with just one click.
What developments are you planning for the coming months?
We are constantly working on extensions, new features and on enhancing usability. Our clients can benefit from regular updates. But we also intend to improve the universal quality of the platform, by which I mean its capacity to be applied to a wide range of areas. Our goal is to provide a flexible analysis software that becomes the standard for future-oriented data monitoring in a transformed energy world. There’s a huge potential here that’s waiting to be tapped. We want to use our monitoring platform to make a significant contribution to climate protection. This mission is what keeps us going, and it is that, what keeps our developers going and coming up with new ideas.
How do clients usually get into contact with you?
Most discover us through the Internet – either through our website or our LinkedIn page, to be specific. And the number of clients is increasing. With energy prices soaring, there is immense external pressure to act. We are very pleased to be able to help with our platform to quickly tap into energy and cost savings potentials. If you want to learn more, we recommend booking a no-strings-attached online consultation via our website. Our consultants can quickly assess whether or not it makes sense to monitor your system with Mondas.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Reetz.
Thank you.
The interview was conducted by JĂĽrgen Leuchtner.