Smart energy management becomes the new standard in residential complexes

A vacation park with chargers, solar panels, heat pumps and batteries now sounds quite normal. But all these sustainable installations also create a new challenge: how do you prevent the available grid capacity from being exceeded?

This is precisely why the need for smart energy control is growing. Especially now that grid congestion is increasing and the balancing scheme will soon disappear, a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is becoming increasingly relevant. With Embion HEMS, Embion responds to this development and offers a solution for residential complexes where smart energy management becomes increasingly important.

Electrification puts more pressure on the grid

The Netherlands is working towards a natural gas-free built environment in 2050. New build homes are therefore increasingly being built without a gas connection, while existing homes are becoming massively more sustainable with installations such as:

• Heat pumps

• Electric boilers

• Solar panels

• Chargers

• Batteries

As a result, more and more energy consumption is shifting from gas to electricity.

The end of the balancing system

From January 1, 2027, the net-metering scheme will be abolished. This will make it more financially attractive to use locally generated energy directly yourself instead of supplying it back to the grid.

Smart energy control helps with this by automatically controlling batteries, heat pumps and chargers based on available solar power or dynamic energy prices. This allows residents to use more of their own energy and respond more intelligently to price differences in the energy market.

Increasing sustainability of residential complexes

Housing corporations, care complexes, student housing, vacation parks and owners' associations are also increasingly investing in shared energy facilities such as solar panels, charging stations and battery systems.

At the same time, the need for smart distribution of energy within buildings is growing. Who uses how much power? When is shared storage deployed? And how do you prevent peak loads on the main connection?

A HEMS helps to intelligently manage those energy flows and use available capacity more efficiently.

Grid congestion makes smart energy management necessary

In an increasing number of places in the Netherlands, insufficient grid capacity is available for new construction or further sustainability. As a result, projects are delayed or installations cannot be fully utilized.

By intelligently managing energy consumption, residential housing complexes can use their existing connection more efficiently. Consider:

• Spreading peak consumption
• Smart charging of electric vehicles
• Local storage of energy
• Managing for maximum contracted power.

This creates more space within the existing grid connection and sustainable projects can be realized faster.

How Embion HEMS responds to this

Embion HEMS has been developed for residential complexes where multiple homes and energy assets need to work together smartly. Here, several HEMS systems can be connected to a central EMS on the main connection of the building.

The system continuously monitors the total energy consumption of the residential complex and helps make optimal use of available grid capacity.

Always insight through the Embion user app

Besides the HEMS system itself, we will soon introduce the Embion user app for mobile devices, available for iOS and Android.

Residents and end users do not always need to consult the extensive dashboards of the Embion Hub. The app provides the same data in a simpler, mobile form and quickly answers the questions that matter every day: what are you consuming now? What are you generating? How is your installation performing today?

Everything clearly displayed in one clear dashboard. Do you work with multiple locations, such as a manager of multiple vacation parks or housing complexes? Then you can easily switch between different environments. After logging in with your Hub account details, you have immediate access to your environment, even without a perfect connection: the app stores data locally, so you can also view historical data.

Ready for the next step in energy management

The combination of electrification, grid congestion and changing energy rules makes smart energy management increasingly important.

With Embion HEMS, we help residential housing complexes distribute energy smarter, make the best use of renewable assets and be prepared for tomorrow's energy demands.