PowerHub: a Virtual Power Plant at Ørsted

Context

At Ørsted, then DONG Energy, the shift toward renewables meant running many small, distributed generation assets together rather than a few large plants. A virtual power plant clusters installations like micro-CHP, wind turbines, small hydro, and back-up generators under one central control entity, so they can be operated as a single plant and deliver peak or load-aware power at short notice. That only works with reliable, real-time integration across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

What I did

I worked as a developer and architect on PowerHub, designing service-oriented and event-driven integrations to bring around 20 distributed assets together. PowerHub was a real-time system: it monitored the distributed units and hooked into the live power supply system so they could be operated as one. It was built on services and message queues with its own API, the service-oriented style that came before the term microservices and before REST was common. The hard part of any such platform is coordinating a complex, secure flow of messages and control signals across assets in real time, and the integration backbone is what made the coordinated operation possible. I built good CI and CD into the delivery so changes shipped continuously and safely.

Outcome

Ørsted gained a working Virtual Power Plant and the integration backbone to run distributed energy as a coordinated whole, an early step in the company’s move toward renewable operations.