
Ecostyle’s solar generation forecasting and balancing service is now available also to power plants built by other companies, the renewable asset development, EPC, and O&M company announced on September 6, 2024.
As part of the solar generation forecasting service, Ecostyle provides customers with weather- and actual generation-based generation forecasts that the customers can then use to create and submit their supply and demand plans to the grid operator. As part of the balancing service, Ecostyle also generates and submits the supply and demand plans on behalf of customers and assumes their imbalance risk.
Ecostyle now offers generation forecasts for power plants in all nine mainland TSO areas (all but Okinawa) excluding those that are on remote islands and in snowy areas. The balancing service is only available to customers with at least 1MWAC of combined eligible output per TSO area, and is not available in Hokkaido, Hokuriku, and Okinawa.
The company charges a set-up fee of either 5,000 (bulk scheme) or 10,000 yen (individual power plant) per power plant for both services.
Customers using the generation forecasting service can then choose between generation volume-based and rated capacity-based pricing. For the former, Ecostyle charges 0.5 yen/kWh while for the latter it charges 50 yen/kWDC. The balancing service is priced based on generation volume (kWh) and is negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Currently, the majority of Japan’s renewable capacity is under the feed-in-tariff scheme which does not come with imbalance risk. Increasingly more new projects, however, are either under the feed-in-premium scheme or under neither, requiring their owners to submit supply and demand plans to the grid operator and pay imbalance penalties proportional to the deviation of the actuals from the plans.