Opening cross-border electricity services in Europe

The electricity market in Europe is becoming more open as cross-border demand response and distributed generation flexibilities of commercial and industrial customers are demonstrated in the project Flexiciency.

CyberGrid's flexibility management platform paves the way for aggregators and utilities to sell their services on a pan-European scale. What was for a long time merely political wishful thinking is becoming a reality in the European energy project Flexiciency, where a new pilot case between CyberGrid and the utility partners in the project has proven how cross-border trading of electricity services can become a reality.

“Today flexibility from different energy sources can be traded on different electricity markets, like balancing, intraday and day-ahead markets. In the future, we can expect emergence of new markets for flexibilities, especially in the Distributed System Operator (DSO) domain. Within the Flexiciency project, CyberGrid is putting this kind of use-cases to the test with their flexibility platform and opens flexibility services to the national and international market players”, explains Andraž Andolšek, Senior Development Expert, IT and Data Specialist at CyberGrid.

CyberGrid, as a member of the European Union funded Flexiciency project, facilitates the EU market place by emulating a pan-European aggregator with its virtual power plant (VPP). If by today aggregators want to participate in a new balancing market (e.g. in another EU country), they must consider a variety of regulatory and technical barriers, which prolong the new business adoption – and in most instances, prohibits a beneficial business case. The EU Market Place helps remove these barriers, defines standardized interfaces and offers aggregators a much faster and cheaper integration with the balancing market on one side and communication with the end-devices on the other.

Flexibility use cases

A pan-European aggregator will support three flexibility use cases within the project:

1. Flexibility forecasting: VPP’s advanced algorithms calculate potential available flexibility with underlying data from smart-meters.
2. Flexibility offers: by aggregating different energy units (C&I, PV, wind, batteries), the VPP calculates flexibility offers which can be utilized by TSOs (balancing) or DSOs (local grid problems).
3. Meter readings: by adopting B2B meter reading interface, the flexibility platform can request for regulated (DSOs smart meters) or unregulated data in any supported granularity.

Flexiciency

4 major Distribution System Operators located in Italy, France, Spain and Sweden are undertaking 5 large-scale demonstrations to show that the deployment of efficient novel services in the electricity retail markets and flexibility services can be accelerated thanks to an open European market place based on standardised interactions among electricity stakeholders, opening up the energy market also to new players at EU level.

These 4 DSOs have a smart metering infrastructure in place and are associated with electricity retailers - including one operating in a no-smart-meter environment -aggregators, software providers, a system integrator, research organizations and one large consumer.