Uniper partners with Gradyent to reduce cost and CO2 emissions

Uniper is an international energy company that operates roughly 33 GW of generating capacity, which ranks the company among the world’s largest power producers. By implementing Gradyent’s Digital Twin Platform, the company is saving cost and CO₂ emissions.

Challenge

Uniper has the ambition to reduce CO₂ by 50% in 2030, compared to 2019, of its power plants in Europe. The company is striving for cost efficiency and decarbonisation of its heat production units connected to district heating networks, making its heating systems more efficient and sustainable while delivering affordable and reliable heat to their customers.

The team at Uniper believes that digital plays a key role in making this transformation happen and has selected Gradyent as its partner. Uniper’s aim is to use all possible asset-based and intelligent, digital solutions to approach the decarbonisation goal.

Solution

At the heart of Gradyent’s digital solution is a Digital Twin Platform. It is a digital copy of the physical heating system, combining geographical, weather, and sensor data with physics-based models and AI. It can predict the heating system’s behaviour, enabling district heating companies to optimise, decarbonise, and grow their systems.

Gradyent implemented a real-time Digital Twin for one of the Uniper heating systems in 2021, including the heat distribution in the network and the heat production units – a complex system of multiple production units in different locations across the network.

Results

While ensuring that every user in the network obtains sufficient heat, the Digital Twin optimises the operation of the network and the source heat dispatch by selecting the most cost-efficient operation strategy of the heat production assets.

In the intuitive Digital Twin Platform, the operators are supported by choosing the most optimal operating setpoints. Heat losses in the network are minimised by deploying setpoints for lower operating temperatures. At the same time, the security of supply is increased.

The Digital Twin shows substantial cost and CO₂ reduction potential to Uniper by optimising the heat network. This proves that cost savings and decarbonisation can go together, enabling Uniper to reach a critical milestone on the decarbonisation journey of district heating.

Uniper expects that additional use cases can easily be added to the Digital Twin Platform to unlock even more value. For example, the solution was expanded to test the impact of adding a heat pump to the production mix and delivered valuable insights into the optimal choice of specifications, as well as dynamics and operating modes for the heat production strategy including heat pumps.

The Digital Twin is now live, and Uniper and Gradyent are working closely to turn projected CO₂ and operational cost savings into measurable impact.