ENERES Co., Ltd.
Shibaura Institute of Technology

ENERES Co., Ltd. and Shibaura Institute of Technology will conduct research from May 2024 to March 2025 on optimal distributed control methods combining ENERES’s high-precision power control logic with MEC-RM (Multi-Access Edge Computing Resource Management) technology, aiming to achieve both “securing technical requirements such as control accuracy” and “further improving scalability contributing to cost reduction” toward expanding the use of low-voltage resources in the balancing market.

The balancing market, which trades “balancing capacity” necessary for maintaining power supply-demand balance, fully established all product menus for high-voltage resources in FY2024 and began full-scale operation.
While expansion to low-voltage resources is expected in FY2026, utilizing low-voltage resources presents many challenges including securing control accuracy, and one solution is applying “group management/control” that aggregates and controls low-voltage resources as resource groups.

For realizing “group management/control,” ENERES developed and demonstrated control technology for DER equipment using MEC servers in the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy’s “DER Aggregation Demonstration Project” in FY2021-23 (subsidy execution organization: Sustainable open Innovation Initiative), confirming that operational-level control accuracy could be secured. However, commercialization requires establishing a low-cost environment capable of high-precision control of tens to hundreds of thousands of low-voltage resources, and we were seeking implementation technology.

Professor Midori Sugaya of Shibaura Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Engineering, Department of Computer and Communications Engineering, and the MEC-RM research team have broad knowledge in research including optimal distributed control of computing resources, advancing research and development of MEC-RM technology that realizes low power consumption and ultra-distribution as a research result of JST CREST ” Technology for Computing Revolution for Society 5.0″. MEC-RM technologyis a distributed control processing technology characterized by high technical versatility and high-speed performance.
In FY2024, we will work jointly with Shibaura Institute of Technology to examine and evaluate whether utilizing “MEC-RM” can simultaneously achieve both “high-precision control of large numbers of low-voltage resources” and “cost reduction of the control environment.”
ENERES and Shibaura Institute of Technology will together take on the challenge of building mechanisms to utilize low-voltage resources as balancing capacity, contributing to making renewable energy the main power source and realizing a decarbonized society.