Munich continues to maintain its interests for renewable energy power sources and also to glow the Allianz Arena, the place where the local soccer team FC Bayern Munich plays.
As we noticed in a Smartplanet’s article, the local utility company SWM – Stadtwerke Munchen also called Munich City Utilities has joined with Siemens AG to operate small power stations, including other six renewable energy installations to have enough energy and to sell excess to national grid area.
The company declared in a press release: “The main aim of SWM is to improve the reliability of planning and forecasting for decentralized power generation sources.” It also has integrated a total of 20 megawatts of capacity from the 12 plants which include 5 hydro stations, 1 wind farm, and 6 “unit-type cogenerating stations.”
With help of Siemens technology SMW could deal with spikes in renewable energy (e.g. wind power production) that otherwise go to waste or overload the grid. In fact SMW is using a Siemens “distributed energy management” system called DEMS, which makes note of weather forecasts, current electricity prices, and demand, and then plans production accordingly.
The system makes use of software in communications technologies that connect the 12 plants, including LAN, WAN, GPRS and ISDN. The technology comes from the Smart Grid division of Siemens’ Infrastructure and Cities group and should all help keep the lights on as efficiently as possible in Munich.
The press release stated: “The calculated deployment schedule consequently minimizes the costs of generation and operation in the interconnected plants making up the virtual power station.”
