DSM: Innovative electricity supply and participation in the balancing energy market

Alpiq offers DSM a flexible contract model that allows the company to secure its electricity requirements at transparent and competitive prices. For this, Alpiq provides market access, integrates electricity sales between DSM and third parties into the supply, and balances the deviations between the short-term demand forecast and the actual electricity consumption. “The flexibility and conditions of Alpiq’s solution were what convinced us, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration”, says Karen Wursteisen, Energy Buyer and Lead Sustainability at DSM.

DSM’s premises in Lalden in the canton of Valais are also home to a power-to-heat plant that generates process heat and supplies secondary balancing power to the national grid company Swissgrid. The system can be flexibly deployed, is capable of very fast output changes and is thus ideally suited to help stabilise the electricity grid. This service is becoming increasingly important and contributes to Switzerland’s security of supply, particularly in view of the increase in fluctuating, renewable energies. With its “Improve, Enable, Advocate” strategy and its goal of covering 75% of its consumption with renewable energy by 2030, DSM is the ideal partner for this.

In addition to DSM’s plant, Alpiq’s balancing energy pool consists of numerous combined heat and power plants and other industrial power-to-heat plants as well as large-scale batteries. All these plants are controlled by an artificial intelligence platform developed by Alpiq without impacting the operations of the industrial companies involved.
“Our access to the market for balancing energy enables us to generate profitable annual revenues. The performance achieved thanks to artificial intelligence has lived up to our expectations. Like Alpiq, DSM is keen to continuously implement new technologies in order to tap into additional efficiencies. This is what convinced us to continue our collaboration with Alpiq,” says Karen Wursteisen.

In this way, DSM is demonstrating how suitable energy procurement models and software platforms can open up new opportunities for industry to not only make energy supplies more secure and more cost-effective, but also to generate additional income by providing balancing power.