Homeowners form the largest solar power plant in Switzerland – and warn

The company Helion is tinkering with a new idea. Swissgrid is also convinced of this – in the future homeowners will stabilize the Swiss power grid.

Noah Heynen is a inventor, a man with resourceful ideas and a nose for business. In 2008, at the age of 20, he founded the Helion with a partner. A few months later, he screwed a first solar system on a roof in Riedholz in the canton of Solothurn. « It was the roof of our secondary teacher, » says Heynen. « In retrospect, I am amazed at the confidence at the time that he brought us towards. »

Today, Helion is industry leader in photovoltaics, and this is booming in Switzerland. Heynen’s company now belongs to the AMAG Group, installs over 1300 solar systems every year and employs more than 500 employees. And Heynen has an idea again. When he talks about it, it just bubbles out of him: « Yes, I’m really a bit proud of that now, » he says at the end of a three -quarter -hour conversation. No wonder: In principle, Heynen is working on the first virtual power plant in Switzerland.

Network stability: a difficult job

To explain this, there is a little prior knowledge about the European electricity balance. This always keeps the balance of production and consumption. This means: blows a little less wind on a turbine at short notice, opens the lock of a hydropower plant somewhere so that the current flows evenly from the socket. This is called frequency preservation. In Switzerland, this equilibrium of the networks and power plants keeps the Swissgrid company.

With the expansion of renewables, your job becomes more demanding. Power peaks and bottlenecks in the power grid become everyday life with wind, solar and hydropower. That is why large electricity suppliers also plan the construction of huge batteries that can store or deliver energy at short notice – at a good price. The most famous systems are pumped storage power plants such as Linth lembers or Nant-de-Drance.

This is exactly where Noah Heynen’s idea comes in: Instead of huge reservoirs in his hand, he wants to decentralize the network compensation. « Every household with a solar system on the roof, a heat pump and a small battery is basically a small compensatory power plant, » says Heynen. Because on the one hand, this could deliver electricity itself or increase consumption – by loading the house battery, the electric car or throwing the heat pump. In the opposite case, the households supply their electricity to Swissgrid for frequency maintenance.

« This is made possible by the use of artificial intelligence, » says Heynen. In Ticino he found a small start-up that developed the software for the virtual power plant. Because only in a Switzerland-wide network of solar system owners does the power plant reach a relevant size. « If a third of today’s PV systems were equipped with our technology, this would correspond to the pumping performance of Linth-Limmer, » says Heynen. And if the expansion of solar power continues as the electricity law provides, it could also be two pumped storage power plants by 2030. This provided that a third of the solar system owners become part of Heynen’s concept.

Participation can be financially worthwhile: the control output is specially compensated for at the energy market. « For private customers, the result is 200 to CHF 300 additional income, 1,000 and more francs per year for industrial customers, » estimates Heynen. This is a plus, especially in times in which solar power has less worth less than more and more phases of negative energy prices.

« Are very interested »

Swissgrid has given the project green light: « We are very interested in this technology, » says Serge Wisselmann from Swissgrid. In this form, the fact that a pool of private households participate in network stability is new and offer additional flexibility. The project runs for six months in a test phase with around 50 households. « But the advantage is simple scalability, » says Heynen.

From this weekend he wants to include new customers from Helion, from next year the existing ones. « This creates a network of mini power plants that can react extremely quickly to fluctuations, » says Heynen. «The solar expansion can no longer be broken. Now it is important to use the available energy as intelligently as possible. » It is quite possible that Heynen will soon call his former secondary school teacher again.