Electricity flexibility

Your building can support the power grid at peak times, and be paid for it.

Shifting or reducing heating, ventilation or air-conditioning load for a few tens of minutes, without disturbing occupants: that is flexibility. Kipsum assesses your load-shedding capacity and controls it with KiTwin.

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What is electricity flexibility?

Flexibility, or demand response, means temporarily reducing or shifting a site’s electricity consumption in response to a grid or market signal. For the grid, a reduction is worth as much as extra generation: it helps balance supply and demand at every moment, especially during winter peaks.

The official bodies

RTE, the French transmission system operator, balances the national grid, certifies the volumes shed and sets the market rules for monetising flexibility. It publishes these rules on its Services Portal.
The CRE, the French energy regulatory commission, an independent authority, approves the market rules proposed by RTE. Its decisions set the “baseline” methods, which estimate what the site would have consumed without the load reduction.

Monetisation mechanisms

NEBCO (consumption block exchange notification, which replaced the NEBEF mechanism in 2025): monetise blocks of load reduction — and now load shifting — on electricity markets, without notifying your supplier.
Balancing mechanism and ancillary services: flexibility used by RTE in real time to correct grid imbalances.
Capacity mechanism: pays for a site’s availability to reduce load during periods of high stress, notably winter alert days.

Two types of payment: capacity (a premium for power kept available, in €/MW) and energy (payment after actual activation, in €/MWh).

How does it work for your building?

Unless you consume several tens of megawatts, you do not contract directly with RTE: you go through an aggregator, a flexibility operator that pools several sites and offers them on RTE’s mechanisms. RTE publishes the lists of aggregators; the site’s payment is set by its contract with the aggregator.

The aggregator relies on the BMS or on energy-intensive equipment (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, cooling production). When a signal is received, power is reduced or shifted for a few tens of minutes, within the comfort limits set, and the site receives a share of the revenue generated.

What Kipsum does

Assess your installations’ load-shedding capacity: which equipment, how much power, for how long, without affecting comfort or processes.
Prepare the BMS: a controllable, connected BMS is the prerequisite for any flexibility.
Control with KiTwin: the twin forecasts weather and internal gains, and shifts consumption at the right time — for example by pre-heating or storing cold when electricity is cheap.
A real case: on a large tertiary site using 1 GWh of cooling per summer, the digital twin shifts cooling production through thermal storage — 1,200 kWh of flexibility per day, and savings rising from €6,500 in 2021 to €36,000 in 2022.

Kipsum has also run a flexibility experiment with TotalEnergies On at the group’s headquarters in Pau.

Official sources (in French)

How flexible is your building?

We assess it during the audit.

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