Elisa unveils home energy storage service in Finland

Elisa is well known as Finland’s leading teleoperator and has been steadily acquiring a growing reputation as a provider of innovative and exciting software solutions. The company’s most recent innovation is a smart home energy storage service for residential properties that compensates for spikes in the electricity market price and can store electricity produced by solar panels for later use.

This smart control of domestic electricity use is based on Elisa’s Distributed Energy Storage (DES) solution, an AI-driven virtual power plant that is also used to optimize batteries in Elisa's mobile network base stations. This home energy storage service connects residential batteries to Elisa’s battery reserve, which provides grid-balancing services that improve the stability of the entire Finnish power grid. Households taking advantage of the service also benefit financially from participating in the battery reserve scheme.

Around one third of Finnish households purchase electricity through spot-price electricity contracts. The number of residential properties switching to spot-price electricity has increased rapidly over the last couple of years. Solar panels are also becoming more common: according to an estimate from the Finnish Energy Authority, small-scale production capacity of solar power (known as “micro-generation”) increased by about 47% in 2023 compared to the previous year, and almost 30,000 single-family houses had photovoltaic panels.* As summer turns to autumn, many buyers of spot-price electricity are noticing that their cheap electricity has already risen to high January levels in some cases, as nuclear power plants and transmission connections have been down for maintenance, and the cloudy weather with little wind has been suboptimal for lower-cost renewable electricity production.

But help is at hand for consumers stung by high electricity prices. Elisa has developed an AI-powered smart residential energy storage service, called Elisa Kotiakku in Finnish, where consumers get a smart battery and software as a complete, all-in-one installed solution for a simple monthly fee. As electricity prices fluctuate, the system automatically charges the batteries when prices are low, smoothing out spikes in electricity spot prices. If the household has solar panels, it can also connect to them, storing electricity produced by the panels during the day for use in the evening and morning, when the sun is not shining, and spot prices are usually high.

“There is clearly demand for a service like this, as the service has been attracting a huge amount of interest. We installed and commissioned the first systems in September. We’re continuing to develop the service, and we’ll be steadily expanding its availability”, says Jukka-Pekka Salmenkaita, Director of Artificial Intelligence and Special Projects at Elisa.

Elisa’s innovative residential battery service became available in the Helsinki metropolitan area in September. Following a successful trial period, Elisa is expanding availability throughout the Uusimaa and Tampere regions in October.

Consumers helping to balance out fluctuations in the Finnish electricity grid – and getting rewarded for taking part

Elisa’s smart home energy storage service works as part of Elisa’s DES solution, the distributed virtual power plant used in Elisa’s mobile network base stations, which uses AI to optimise the purchase of electricity. Elisa DES doesn’t only control and optimize the batteries in the base stations – it also helps level out fluctuations in the Finnish electricity grid. Elisa has a licence from Fingrid, the national grid operator, to use its base station battery reserves to provide balance services in the Finnish electricity market,

“To solve the energy challenges of the future, we need to develop innovative solutions. This home energy storage service connects residential battery banks to Elisa's battery reserve, which supplies balancing power to the reserve market when needed to balance the Finnish electricity network. This allows us to offer a significantly lower price than the normal market price for domestic battery systems, and we also reward our customers for participating in the battery reserve”, says Salmenkaita.

Elisa is the first telecom operator in the world to utilise the reserve batteries in its mobile network base stations to balance the electricity market. This is important, as the increase in wind and solar energy production capacity is also leading to increases in fluctuations in electricity production. For us to continue increasing renewable electricity generation and move forward with the green transition, electricity storage capacity is needed to help balance the grid.

“Households who acquire this service are also helping to increase the flexibility of the energy network and improving Finland’s security of supply and crisis resilience”, says Salmenkaita.

Elisa home energy storage service in brief:

- Monthly service that provides a 10–30 kWh battery and the control software as a complete, all-in-one solution, with an app that makes it easy to monitor how the battery and system are working.

- Automatically charges the battery when electricity spot prices are low and stores electricity from solar panels for later use.

- Evens out spikes in electricity spot prices, lowering electricity bills.

- Battery reserve also ensures that important electrical equipment keeps running during a power failure.

- Reduces household carbon dioxide emissions.

- Consumers are rewarded for participating in Elisa’s grid-balancing battery reserve.