Prosumers will soon become common in Denmark.

Prosumers? If you are in Denmark, or have been there lately, you wouldn't need a cryptologist to crack the word for you. As the country marches towards its goal of getting half of its electricity from wind power by 2020, inevitably every household is an electricity storage unit — a taker and giver of electricity, a producer and a consumer of power. Or, a prosumer.

Denmark is, for sure, a small, windy country and can meet lofty goals with fewer challenges than others. Nevertheless, what the country is doing in terms of use of renewable energy shows the way. Simply put, it plans a massive wind power thrust and intends to solve the grid problems using the market and consumers as the key instruments of maintaining grid stability.

Consumers will buy power when the generation is surplus, and therefore, cheap, and store it in various forms — batteries in electric cars, ‘heat pumps' that convert electricity into heat and store it, compressed air and fuel cells that produce hydrogen from electricity. In addition to these, large centrally operated electric heat pumps that convert electric energy into heat energy (for conversion back into electric energy when needed) also aid grid stability.

The smart grid

The backbone of all this is of course the smart grid that can seamlessly ‘flex up' or ‘flex down' generation across multiple stations and the consumption. Imagine, you just plug the cable into your car and go to bed; the recharging happens only when the electricity costs are low, which will be naturally when the windmills are busy. People at Energinet, the State-owned utility that manages the entire grid from its headquarters at Erritso, describe the future electric cars that would be plying on Danish roads as ‘ one giant storage battery'.

When the generation is down, the stored energy is used and any surplus put back into the grid, which can make its way into markets as far as Spain.

Over the next eight years, Denmark will put up 3,300 MW of wind capacity, 1,000 MW of which will be in the deep seas and another 500 MW near shore. With energy conservation measures, the gross energy consumption will come down 12 per cent over the 2006 levels. Carbon dioxide levels will come down 40 per cent over the 1990 levels. By 2030, coal is to be completely phased out. By 2050, Denmark wants to kiss goodbye to fossil fuels and be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy. Gradually, the natural gas from North Sea will be replaced by bio gas.

Putting into practice

While the concept of using a combination of the market as a grid-stabilising agent with the use of smart grid is nothing new in theory, Denmark has shown the guts to put it into practice and, therefore, will be a precedent-setter. All this is being done without pinching the pockets of the consumers too sharply.

It is estimated that the incremental taxes that a family would have to pay in 2020 would be €175, or Rs 12,250, a year — a small price for clean environment and energy security. A smart prosumer may even make more money than the extra taxes he pays.

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