Our solutions

In order to supply today’s industrial and transportation sectors, our current energy infrastructure relies primarily on molecules with high energetic density such as oil, natural gas, coal, or biomass. Replacing these molecules with hydrogen produced from renewable power is a priority in order to enable the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Hydrogen produced by electrolysis from these renewable and carbon-free power sources can serve:

• As a substitute for current hydrogen consumption in industrial sectors where it is used as a utility;
• As clean fuel in response to new energy uses in transportation sectors as well as in conventional power plants currently running on natural gas, etc.

Verso Energy contributes to the emergence of a post-oil economy by producing hydrogen directly from renewable power but also by supporting the inception of local ecosystems including production, distribution, storage and consumption of carbon-free hydrogen.

As long as solar and wind shares in the energy mix remained low, their variability did not raise any particular technical issues and their development was based entirely on state-backed power purchase agreements remunerating production at a fixed price regardless of its real value.

The rapid rise of solar and wind power driven by their growing competitive advantages is resulting in two major evolutions:

• The grid integration is more and more constrained. Solar or wind power plants must adapt to this new context and meet the requirements of grid operators by offering additional ancillary services: peak shaving, load shifting, fast frequency response, reactive power injection,, etc.
• Commercial and contractual mechanisms are evolving. Renewable generation is now sold on the merchant power markets through CFDs (“contracts for difference”) or through power purchase agreements signed directly with off-takers who expect renewables to offer a more predictable production profile tailored to their own consumption profile.

Verso Energy addresses theses challenges by developing, financing and operating dispatchable power plants equipped with storage capacities in order to produce carbon-free renewable power adapted to the needs of the market, the TSO/DSO, and the clients.

Conventional power plants (gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric dams) rely on rotating machines (turbines) whose inertia contributes to the reliability of the power system.

Their replacement by renewable sources such as photovoltaic solar energy or wind energy, which do not have the same inertia, raises some technical issues.

However, solutions are already available – such as the development of fast frequency response services offered by battery energy storage systems (BESS) or specific inverters, or the deployment of synchronous compensators, which contribute to the stability of the system by providing inertia and short-circuit power.

Verso Energy contributes to the grid integration of renewables by developing, financing and operating battery energy storage systems offering ancillary services to support the grid and meet the needs of grid operators (TSOs and DSOs).

An effective way to cope with the greater variability in power production is to develop greater flexibility in demand. This is a major issue for manufacturers with high power consumption: their facilities will increasingly have to manage their load according to market prices or requests from TSOs. The difficulty is to develop this load management flexibility while minimizing the constraint for the client and the continuity of its industrial operations.

An industrial client can benefit from an incentive to interrupt its consumption, but also in certain cases to increase its consumption (during episodes of negative prices). Implementing such demand response services is obviously possible without storage, but the addition of batteries makes it possible to improve flexibility and to generate more income while reducing the constraint on industrial operations.

Verso Energy helps increase demand-side flexibility by financing, installing and operating storage facilities for our industrial clients, in order to offer them a more efficient load management solution while working to reduce the carbon footprint of the power mix.