IBM collaborates with the City of Copenhagen to balance the energy system

Enterprise leaders today face the dual challenges of transitioning to sustainable energy sources while ensuring consistent energy efficiency and resilience. The imperative to meet net-zero climate goals is pressing, driven by regulatory demands, stakeholder expectations, and the obligation to combat climate change. However, the variability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar presents significant obstacles to maintaining a stable and reliable energy supply. This complexity requires innovative solutions that seamlessly integrate renewable energy into existing systems, optimize consumption, and ensure business continuity.

To combat these challenges, IBM partnered with Andel Energi, Denmark’s largest energy company, to develop and test a demand-side flexibility solution for the City of Copenhagen that helps balance renewable sources in the energy system. Using IBM’s Flex Platform, the initiative enhanced energy efficiency, integrated more renewables into the grid, and ensured a reliable energy supply. This collaboration highlights the potential of advanced technologies and the HFS OneEcosystem™ approach for sustainable urban development.

The City of Copenhagen is committed to net-zero emissions to boost energy efficiency and sustainability

As part of the city’s net-zero key goals, one of the major challenges was renovating and centralizing its building management systems across all public buildings, including schools, administration, and cultural buildings. The program’s purpose was to reduce the city’s overall energy usage, cost, and CO2 emissions. In this context, the City of Copenhagen, in collaboration with IBM, saw the opportunity to pivot the planned energy and cost savings and CO2 emissions while supporting the national climate objective to infuse more renewable energy and ensure the power system’s resilience.

In partnership with Andel Energi, Denmark’s largest energy company, IBM deployed its Flex Platform to address these challenges. The Flex Platform is integrated with centralized building management systems, enabling real-time adjustments to energy use across the collection of buildings to balance the renewable energy availability in the power system. The platform aggregates demand-side flexibility for intelligent grid optimization and energy balancing using IoT sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud technologies. The platform can dynamically respond to energy production and consumption changes, providing real-time solutions to complex energy challenges.

IBM’s Flex Platform enables Copenhagen to reduce CO2 emissions, achieve savings, and integrate more renewable energy into the system

By optimizing energy consumption in real time based on the availability of renewable sources such as wind and solar, the platform enables public buildings and electrical assets to act as virtual batteries, reducing usage of thermal power plants and their associated emissions.

Since undertaking the project with the City of Copenhagen, IBM’s Flex Platform has delivered notable results, including:

• Reducing energy consumption and emissions: The City of Copenhagen and many other clients are helping with the national transition to renewables and reduced CO2 emissions.
• Economic savings: The city and consumers who use the platform spend less annually on electricity through optimized energy use and provisioning of demand-side flexibility, and they can reallocate those cost savings into other energy efficiency initiatives.
• Wide application: Following the project with the City of Copenhagen, the Flex Platform’s value has been demonstrated across thousands of assets in Denmark, with asset sizes between 5 kW and 40 MW, incorporating systems such as ventilation, coolers, heat pumps, solar parks, heat coils, batteries, LED lights, load banks, and EV charging stations.
• Enhanced flexibility: The Flex Platform’s ability to balance fluctuating renewable energy production ensures resilience in the Danish power system. Buildings and assets can temporarily reduce or increase energy draw during high or low renewable energy availability periods, supporting grid stability.

The success of the Flex Platform in Copenhagen exemplifies the OneEcosystem principles

The partnership between IBM and Andel Energi underscores the importance of collaborative ecosystems in driving innovation and achieving sustainability targets. This partnership model embodies the HFS OneEcosystem model, emphasizing seamless collaboration among organizations to drive new sources of value by integrating customer, employee, and partner experiences beyond traditional organizational boundaries (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: The OneEcosystem™ model creates value by fostering collaboration among customers, employees, and partners, transcending organizational silos to drive innovation.

Source: HFS Research, 2022

The Bottom Line: For enterprise leaders, IBM’s work with the City of Copenhagen highlights the importance of integrating advanced energy management technologies and fostering collaborative ecosystems to achieve sustainability targets.

The partnership between IBM, Andel Energi, and the City of Copenhagen is a testament to the power of collaborative ecosystems in driving real, measurable progress toward net-zero goals. By integrating IBM’s Flex Platform, the City of Copenhagen optimized its energy consumption, reduced CO2 emissions, and unlocked economic cost reduction through demand-side flexibility that can be reinvested into further sustainability initiatives.

For enterprise leaders, this collaboration highlights a critical insight: achieving sustainability targets demands not just an advanced technology but an ecosystem approach that brings together energy providers, technology developers, and end-users in a seamless, dynamic ecosystem.