Case Elisa: Virtual Power Plant in the Telecom Industry
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Overview: Turning Telecom Batteries into a Virtual Power Plant
Elisa, a leading Finnish telecom operator, partnered with Gridle to transform the batteries in the mobile base stations into a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). This innovative initiative leverages AI to generate optimize when to charge and discharge the base station batteries. This generates new revenue, reduces costs and emissions and supports Finland’s green energy transition.
Challenge: Generating Revenue with Resilience
The Finnish regulation mandates telecom operators to have at least three-hour backup power at the telecom base stations. Elisa operates thousands of base stations across Finland and Estonia, each equipped with backup batteries that were idle unless there was a power outage. The underutilization of backup batteries stood out as both an operational inefficiency and a missed opportunity, prompting Elisa to explore how these assets could be activated without jeopardizing uptime. Elisa aimed to solve the following challenges by partnering up with Gridle:
- Turning idle backup batteries into a business advantage.
- Reducing energy costs.
- Enhancing network resilience in a cost-efficient manner
- Powering the network with green energy while contributing to stabilizing he Finnish electricity grid. .
Solution: AI-Powered Virtual Power Plant
Gridle introduced an AI-powered energy optimization platform that turned Elisa’s passive battery infrastructure into an active, revenue-generating Virtual Power Plant. Key features included:
- Real-time optimization of battery charging and discharging based on market signals.
- Participation in electricity reserve markets (e.g., FCR-D, aFRR).
- Aggregation of over 2,000 base station sites into a unified VPP with over 150 MWh of distributed energy storage capacity
Impact
Thanks to its collaboration with Gridle, Elisa can offset a significant share of its energy costs by charging its backup batteries during low‑price hours and using the stored electricity when market prices rise. With a total distributed storage capacity of approximately 150 MWh across thousands of base‑station sites, Elisa can generate new revenue by offering this capacity to balancing and wholesale electricity markets. Because the batteries are intentionally overdimensioned, they not only support market participation but also provide enhanced resilience. This enables Elisa to keep its network running well beyond the required three‑hour requirement.
The main benefits summarized:
- New revenue and cost savings: When combined, the new revenue from electricity markets and the resulting energy cost savings amount to the equivalent of 50% of the total electricity costs of Elisa’s radio access network
- Fast payback time: even though battery projects require upfront investment, Gridle’s impact enables Elisa to pay back the investment in only a few years.
- Enhanced Resilience: Improved network uptime by 2–4x during outages
- Sustainability: Charging the batteries when electricity prices are affordable means that it is produced using renewable and green energy.
- Market Leadership: Elisa became one of Europe’s largest decentralized VPP operators, and the solution has since been adopted by other telecom infrastructure providers
