The Finnish energy company Helen, a significant player in Europe's district heating landscape, has reached a pivotal milestone in its journey towards carbon neutrality by 2030 through a partnership with Gradyent. Together, the companies developed and implemented a Digital Twin of Helen's heating network, which is now operating in real time. This will further enhance Helen's capabilities by optimising demand management, improving network efficiency through real-time monitoring of smart meters and reducing heat losses and CO2 emissions by optimising power plant temperature setpoints.  

The Finnish energy company Helen operates one of the largest district heating networks in Europe (7 TWh/year) that covers about 90% of Helsinki. Inspired by its goal of achieving 100% carbon neutrality in its energy production by 2030, Helen has developed a Digital Twin of its heating system with the help of Gradyent’s solution. 

Gradyent’s Digital Twin has initially helped Helen to resolve a pressure issue within a small area of the network, allowing the company to avoid a substantial CAPEX investment. After that, Gradyent developed an offline Digital Twin of the entire network to allow Helen study various scenarios. The main insights of these scenario analyses helped the company to phase out two large coal CHPs, resulting in a remarkable 60% reduction in coal-produced energy in Finland.

Impressed by this result, Helen decided to expand our partnership and, in October 2023, signed a 3-year contract with Gradyent. As of March 2024, the Digital Twin of Helen’s network operates in real time, providing continuous temperature and hydraulics estimations over the entire network to support decision-making processes in the network’s operation. 

“Through Gradyent Digital Twin, we gain real-time insights into the thermohydraulic behaviour of our network, and we are looking forward to using the real-time Digital Twin to reduce the temperature in the network.’’

Lauri Utriainen, VP Energy Platform at Helen. 

As immediate next steps, Gradyent’s Digital Twin will support Helen in gaining new insights through the real-time monitoring of the 15,000 smart meters, increasing the company’s demand management capabilities. This will allow for identifying poor-performing users, defining actions required to improve outcomes and – as a result – increasing network efficiency.  

Moreover, the Digital Twin will provide temperature setpoints of main power plants to optimise network operations, reducing heat losses and CO2 emissions. 

These steps take Helen in the direction of running an end-to-end network autopilot for the scheduling of heat and electricity production, operating the network and controlling its users. 

"Gradyent’s Digital Twin will empower Helen with real-time insights from 15,000 smart meters, optimising operations to reduce heat loss and CO2 emissions, improving operations efficiency via better source dispatch and enhancing demand management — ultimately paving the way for an end-to-end network autopilot."

Martino Dossi, COO at Gradyent.