Key terms
Demand side response for commercial sites
Demand side response is any deliberate change to a site's electricity consumption, up or down, made in response to a price or a payment.
Lupa was built to tell a commercial property owner or occupier which of those actions is worth most, in every half hour of the year. The building's own consumption, its tariff and its connection limits go into a single optimisation that settles each half hour on whichever action earns or saves the most at that moment, taking account of what the battery did in the hours before and what it will be needed for in the hours after.
The actions it chooses between:
Cheaper hours
Moving production, charging or storage into cheaper hours on a time-varying tariff.
Network charge bands
Holding demand down through the periods when network charges are at their highest.
Wholesale prices
Reacting to wholesale prices where the site is exposed to them, including using more when prices are very low or below zero.
Agreed capacity
Keeping the site under its agreed capacity so it avoids the penalty rates for going over.
Grid operator calls
Turning load down at short notice when the grid operator asks, which is what the balancing services pay for.
Capacity market
Being available on the tightest days of the year, in instances where the country runs a capacity market.
These compete for the same battery and the same hours. Capacity used to buy cheap electricity at three in the morning is capacity unavailable for the evening peak, and an hour committed to an aggregator is an hour the site cannot use to avoid a network charge. The Lupa optimiser solves all of these problems together to find the optimal solution for your site.
01
Create your baseline
Upload interval data and an electricity invoice for the building, and Lupa reads both into the platform without anything being keyed in by hand.
Where interval data is not available, the load profile can be built in the platform from the location, the type of operation, the operating hours and the heating system. Tariffs can be taken from the catalogue in the same way.
Upload or build from scratch
02
Enter site constraints
Enter the maximum rooftop solar system the site can accommodate, alongside the maximum battery size and the site's import and export capacity where these are known.
Left blank, default values are used based on the building type and size.
Site constraints
03
Evaluate multiple scenarios
A site might be planning to electrify its fleet of vehicles, replacing gas heating with heat pumps, or moving to a different supply contract. Each scenario can be modelled separately within the same analysis.
Scenarios
Average daily profile
04
Every option compared on the same terms
Every workable size of solar and battery is priced across a full year at half-hourly resolution on the site's own tariff.
Capital cost, net present value, rate of return, payback and emissions are produced for each one, and the options within a scenario can be compared on whichever measure matters most to the project.
Every option ranked
05
Out to the people who would build, operate and maintain itin build
The chosen option can be sent to the procurement platform, where local EPCs and aggregators evaluate the project and submit proposals.
Out to procurement