Flexibility and load management audit

The flexibility of demand or load management within an industrial or tertiary electricity consumer consists of adapting its electricity consumption profile based on the availability of electricity in the grid. The incentives put in place may take different forms (variable electricity prices, additional income in the case of availability and load reduction, etc.).

The flexibility audit thus aims to enable industrial and/or tertiary sites to optimally exploit their flexibility and to convert it into an energy bill reduction by using mathematical methods such as optimisation.

In practice, during the audit, the ICEDD carries out the following steps:

• Identification of the various processes of a site that can be made flexible, their technical constraints and the methods for optimising these flexibility levers;
• Analysis of electrical flexibility potential;
• Analysis of the opportunities for implementing flexibility (type of contract, Elia reserve products, etc.);
• Estimation of the economic gain that can be obtained through optimum use of the different flexibility levers.

The ICEDD has also developed the “Flexi-calc” tool making it possible to make an initial estimate of the flexibility potential, and thus demonstrate the value of carrying out a detailed flexibility audit on the site.