Zruč nad Sázavou
From smart city to efficient community energy management. Zruč nad Sázavou uses FLOWBOX to monitor 5 PV plants, control battery storage, and optimise its energy sharing allocation key.
How a Czech Municipality Gained Visibility Over Its Own Renewable Energy Sharing
A Municipality Committed to Smart Energy Since 2018
The city of Zruč nad Sázavou is a modern, well-equipped municipality with developed infrastructure. Since 2018, it has been building a smart city platform, gradually connecting individual buildings and technologies. Today, 25 buildings are connected or in the process of being connected, five of which are equipped with photovoltaic systems. Battery storage units are installed at the municipal technical services facility, the primary school, and the kindergarten.
Over this period, the city has achieved 15% savings on energy costs and gained centralised oversight of building operations, enabling fast response to faults and anomalies.
The Challenge: Generation Data Without Visibility Into Community Efficiency
As the number of connected buildings and owned generation sources grew, a key question emerged: how efficiently is the energy produced across the city's PV systems actually being used within its own buildings? The municipality needed visibility into when and where generation overlaps with consumption — and concrete data to inform the correct setup of its energy sharing allocation key.
The Solution: Energy Sharing Monitoring and Active Battery Control via Microgrid
FLOWBOX Energy Management monitors generation across all five PV plants and consumption across the metering points. The system aggregates data and gives the community manager a clear view of how much energy is produced, how much is consumed directly within the city's buildings, and how generation and consumption profiles align across individual sites.
Data-driven allocation key optimisation: Based on measured data, the system evaluates the overlap between generation and consumption within a defined time window (currently 9 AM – 5 PM). The community manager uses these insights to determine how to set the allocation key so it reflects the actual consumption patterns of each building.
Active battery control for maximum local energy utilisation: At night, the system measures the actual power demand of public lighting and issues control commands to the battery storage units, which then supply energy to the grid. Surplus energy generated by the PV systems during the day is stored and used in the evening hours — including through sharing to street lighting.
What FLOWBOX Delivers in Zruč nad Sázavou
Building management and energy monitoring (since 2018)
- Management and optimisation of electricity and water consumption
- Zone-based heating control, lighting, ventilation and heat recovery, CCTV systems
- Indoor air quality monitoring in primary school classrooms
- Centralised fault detection and early notification of technical services
- Automated building operations with remote management capability
Community energy management — FLOWBOX Community + Microgrid
- Generation monitoring across 5 PV plants and consumption monitoring across ~25 metering points
- Monthly generation-consumption overlap reports as a basis for allocation key decisions
- Active control of battery storage units (technical services, primary school, kindergarten) — nighttime power dispatch based on real-time public lighting demand
The Result: An Informed Community Manager and Batteries That Work for the Community
The city now has a unified view of how its generation and consumption sites work together. The community manager has access to concrete data on the generation-consumption overlap, enabling informed decisions about the allocation key — without guesswork.
Battery storage is used actively: surplus PV energy accumulated during the day is deployed in the evening where consumption is highest — including public street lighting.