Remote control center: organization and flexibility in times of negative prices

At the beginning of the year, the structuring of the activity carried out continued with the creation of an additional workstation. New organisational model to anticipate the most pessimistic scenarios. The unprecedented crisis we have just experienced has allowed us to test the choices we made.

A dedicated workstation for each operator, with a minimum distance of 1 metre between each employee, facilitated the application of barrier gestures for our employees while maintaining our remote control center at office, with staggered working hours (7am-3pm and 2pm-10pm).

This continued activity is all the more welcome as the Covid-19 crisis has put all the players in the production, distribution and transmission of electricity in France to the test. With the containment and massive implementation of teleworking, electricity consumption in France has fallen by around 15 to 20% (in equivalent weather conditions), leading to negative electricity prices for many periods.

During these periods of negative prices, when the electricity grid is saturated (with supply far exceeding demand), producers are asked to temporarily halt production, otherwise they will have to pay to produce.

Since the replacement of the feed-in tariff by the remuneration supplement contract (2016 and beyond), wind and photovoltaic producers are also subject to this operation.

Maintaining our remote control center at office has allowed us to better apprehend these periods during which it is necessary to validate the shutdown then restart of a non-negligible number of wind and photovoltaic farms. The number of projects in this situation will inevitably increase year after year.

Projects with energy traders, operated by VALEMO:

Pour rappel, le centre de conduite VALEMO supervise :

• 600 MW wind farms;
• 62 MW photovoltaic farms;
• 300 kW hydro-electic plants;
• 3 marine renewable sites.