Capacity and market facilitators - the role of distribution companies in tomorrow’s electrical grid

With local production and storage, the electrical grid is becoming much more upstream and decentralised. This inevitably also changes the role of Distribution System Operators (DSO’s) – and the question arises: “What is the role of the DSO in tomorrow’s electrical grid?” Project InteGrid will help to answer this question.

CyberGrid has successfully introduced a platform, which opens up a range of possibilities for the role of DSO’s in a much more volatile electrical grid of the future. We are participating in the EU project InteGrid, with a formulated goal to bridge the gap between citizens’ local electricity generation, storage, and the utilities. In this way the traditional role of Distribution Companies expands from distribution and access services to active market facilitation and system optimization services - while still ensuring the traditional areas of security and quality of supply.

”In EDP Distribuição we are now actively involving in InteGrid project, customers from the InovGrid Smart Grid infrastructure, which account today for more than 1,000,000, to test and develop our future role as system optimizers and as market facilitator” says Pedro Godinho Matos, Integrid’s Project Coordinator from EDP Distribuição, - and adds: “the enabling IT platform from CyberGrid, in InteGrid, opens up for us to develop new business models, making use of new data management and VPP functionalities.”

The InteGrid project focuses also on the integration of existing demonstration activities in other regions allowing to move from single solutions to an integrated management at a higher scale while focusing on the scalability and replicability considering current market conditions.

CyberGrid can prove how its IT platform can be used both to scale existing projects and to bring together activities from many different regions and with different approaches. In this sense, we take part in developing the role of DSO's in the future.