The article is taken from SeznamZpravy.cz with the permission of the author.

Billionaire David Beran got rich on non-bank loans. He founded the Profireal Group, which lends money in the Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and the Philippines. Beran calls the European Green Deal "madness" and does not believe in electric cars. Yet he is building his new business on green technology.

Beran controls SOMI Application and Services, which supplies solar systems. At his instigation, the company has developed and offers a controller for its installations that uses artificial intelligence to adjust consumption, battery storage and electricity supply to the grid as the spot market price evolves.

The system evaluates market data, weather forecasts from local weather stations and the consumption characteristics of the building. "According to this, it calculates when it is appropriate to use photovoltaic energy and when to charge it, when to keep the energy in the battery and take it from the grid, and when to sell it. This allows the PV owner to actively move to the spot market and make money from electricity trading," Beran explained in an interview with SZ Byznys.

The gap between cheap and expensive electricity during the day, especially in summer, increases as the share of solar in electricity generation increases.

Those who pay for electricity according to the price on the spot market pay for so-called consumer flexibility - in times of cheap electricity, when the sun is shining and the solar panels are going full blast, you reduce your overall energy payment by making the most of the cheap electricity. You charge home batteries, heat water, run more demanding appliances. In times of higher electricity prices, you limit your use of the grid, ideally drawing power from the battery.

A smart application such as Beran's SOMI automatically controls such regulation.

The advantages and risks of spot trading can be used in our country only by a few owners of domestic power plants with smart meters. Most traders offer tariffs that are only derived from the spot market and do not reflect real-time price fluctuations. Only a few smaller suppliers already allow clients to charge for consumption and supply to the grid by the hour. It is these consumers that Beran's SOMI targets.

Energy start

SOMI is in the early days of delivering smart power plants, having started offering them last November. Now, according to Beran, it installs about 150 systems a month and has contracts worth CZK 2 billion.

The control unit is a standard part of SOMI installations. "The equipment is included in the price of our plant, which is otherwise comparable in price to other suppliers. We are working to be able to offer a stand-alone smart control unit to clients who already have a PV plant. We are testing how compatible our system is with the common types of inverters that are used in our company," explains the investor.

The company is still looking for a business model for the delivery of a stand-alone control system. The owners are considering offering it for a share of future trading revenue.

According to Beran, SOMI plans to expand its energy systems to include heat pumps and eventually electric vehicles. "We are also starting to discuss cooperation with car companies. Even an electric car is basically another energy storage device that can raise the capacity of the whole system. But we have to make sure that the customer using an electric car as a storage system does not lose the battery warranty," Beran adds.

SOMI's typical clients are households and smaller companies. According to Beran, the coordination of PV with storage, consumption and sales will accelerate their return on investment in their own energy by a year to a year and a half.

However, he said the control system has the greatest potential not for end consumers but for electricity traders. It can help them to reduce deviation from the pre-announced consumption, for which traders pay and then pass on the costs to clients.

"We are interested in similar systems and other companies are developing them," confirms Centropol's marketing director Jiří Matoušek.

"Controlling and optimising consumption using technologies such as inverter data reading and remote control of appliances and batteries will become part of the product offering of suppliers for mainstream households in the future," he says.

"This is an opportunity for us to ensure that our customers pay less for energy. It is worth remembering that power electricity without taxes cost CZK 1,600 per megawatt-hour on suppliers' price lists in 2020, is now around CZK 4,000, and will not be much cheaper in the future in an energy-transforming Europe. Optimising consumption and production is not only an opportunity but also a necessity," adds the Centropol manager.

However, Petr Čambala, an energy expert from the consulting company EGÚ Brno, believes that the control systems can only have a more significant effect when they can be connected to a large number of solar power plants and batteries, so that the energy consumed or supplied for balancing deviations can be stacked into larger volumes.

A unique product?

According to Beran, SOMI's offer for end-users of electricity is quite unique in the Czech Republic. "We have the only system for end customers in the world that works so comprehensively," he says.

Lukáš Hataš, an expert in renewable energy and head of the Association for Electromobility, disputes this. "I am familiar with the SOMI system, but there are several other companies in the Czech Republic alone that deal with similar applications. There are hundreds of them abroad," he told SZ Byznys.

Those interested in automatic control of their own energy system do not have many options to choose from in our country, but SOMI has competitors. For example, the Czech Wattee system also works in a similar way.

The SOMI system was originally created on Beran's personal order; the financier was looking for a similar device for his own villa in Chrudim, where his family lives. "I had the system in my head for four years, and during that time I couldn't find anything like it on the market, so I invested in it as an investor," says Beran.

"There are many suppliers of solar systems, but apart from SOMI, practically no one offers equipment that can speculate on the development of the electricity price on the spot market," says Marek Pekoč, one of Beran's first clients, the owner of the FPM-Becon joinery factory in Milevsko.

Pekoč purchased a 75kilowatt solar power plant with 67kWh of storage and a control unit for the company. "We use most of our own energy in operation, but we will have a high surplus in the summer holidays, so I am counting on sales. I don't want to worry about it, I'm comfortable leaving it to a smart app," says the entrepreneur.

He has no experience with the SOMI system yet, he is waiting for the power plant to be connected to the distribution. In any case, he hopes that the management of consumption, accumulation and sales will shorten his return on investment from five to three to three and a half years.

Beran does not have complete experience with the system yet, he is just finishing the photovoltaics for his house in Chrudim. However, he is already using the control of a home energy storage system. When electricity is cheap, he charges the battery from the grid, when it is expensive, he sells it.

"Last year, a 10kWh battery earned us about CZK 35,000," he says. And he is convinced that SOMI's solution has such strong potential that it will succeed abroad. "We want to make SOMI a global company." He plans that as artificial intelligence draws on the ever-increasing volume of data collected on market developments, the accuracy of its predictions, and therefore the efficiency of energy system management, will become more precise.

Potential in the community

Energy experts warn that as the share of renewables increases, there will be more hours with a high surplus of cheap electricity, when the price on the spot market will fall into negative numbers and distributors will be forced to disconnect solar panels remotely. In the Czech Republic, this first happened on Easter Monday this year, but similar situations are likely to increase rapidly.

"The owners of solar farms have to take into account that they will have a surplus at the time when they will produce photovoltaics in the whole region, so everyone will have a surplus and there will be no profit on the sale of electricity," explains Petr Čambala from EGÚ Brno. He is sceptical that smart control systems could bring owners staggering sums of money.

"Already this summer, we will reach a situation where the price of electricity on the spot market will be zero or will fall into negative territory," Lukáš Hataš says.

According to energy experts, large fluctuations in the price of electricity during the day are driving up the effectiveness of smart systems for controlling small power plants. The fluctuations will decrease as the share of storage increases. The price of gas for power plants able to smooth out short-term fluctuations will also matter. And on the price of the allowances that gas-fired power plants have to buy.

"I would say that smart control systems can bring something to consumers if they can be bought cheaply. It can be a small competitive advantage. But it's not a technology that can be considered something revolutionary, epochal. Rather, it is a small step towards greater efficiency," says Petr Čambala, a multi-billionaire David Beran's new business.

Green madness

Beran threw himself into the green energy business, even though he himself does not believe in the sense of decarbonisation policy and the European Green Deal.

Originally he didn't even want to buy photovoltaics himself, he was only interested in trading electricity. Gradually he realized that having his own source of electricity was an easier way to go. He has a similar relationship with electromobility.

He doesn't drive his own electric car. He often travels to the Austrian Alpine resort of Zell am See, where he has a house. He finds a battery-powered car impractical for a 500-kilometre route.

"If I were to buy an electric car, it would be mainly as part of my home energy system. It's a battery on wheels, another energy storage device that can boost my storage capacity. If it's plugged into the home energy system, it will accelerate the return on the investment in its acquisition as well," he says.

Although he is investing in a solar installation company, he describes the European Union's decarbonisation policy as "madness".

"Where European energy regulation will lead is completely beyond my imagination. And I don't have a bad one. Some politicians' ideas are really crazy. It took Europe decades to develop to the prosperity it has today. Now we are endangering our own production, our own industry, because EU regulation is making energy more expensive. The energy industry should be left to normal market development, it would be more natural and healthy," says the solar investor.