RE-Source SEE 2023: No transition without transmission, distribution, and storage

Alexander Kofink and Peter Nemček attended the RE-Source Southeast 2023 event on the 18th and 19th of May in Sofia Tech Park, Bulgaria. The event, dedicated to corporate renewable energy sourcing in Southeast Europe, brought together professionals from the energy industry at the national and international level.

Mr. Nemček took part on the 7th panel discussion titled 'No transition without transmission, distribution, and storage', presented the Flexibility Management Platform CyberNoc, and discussed about the opportunities that flexibility does offer.

The panelists have highlighted the role of digitalization, smart grids, and energy storage for grid stability and security, and what are the new market rules that can be placed to incentivise investments in smart grid congestion management and distributed flexibility.

'No transition without transmission, distribution, and storage'

Mr. Nemček highlighted the importance of integrating renewables into the grid, which can be efficiently done thanks to new technologies that bring reliability and security to the energy market. He remarked the need to unlock more flexibility from small generation power plants, industrial customers, and other small assets like batteries, as the conventional hydropower plants or thermal power plants that currently provide flexibility to balance the system are not enough.

With respect to the aggregation of flexibilities, there are a lot of barriers in the energy sector and there is a need to establish local flexibility markets to address voltage and congestion management. In fact, the aggregation of flexibility can be applied to different power systems use-cases, such as balancing, transmission power grid, or even at the DSO level to efficiently manage the distribution grid.

Other key points during the discussion were portfolio based bidding in balancing markets; combination of different assets to provide more flexibility; and aggregation of demand-response assets, industrial customers and small hydropower plants.

The Flexibility Management Platform CyberNoc, enables the monetization of these types of flexibilities on different markets, and it is already supporting the Platform for the International Coordination of Automated Frequency Restoration and Stable System Operation (PICASO) and the Manually Activated Reserves Initiative (MARI). These European platforms have been implemented for the exchange of balancing energy from frequency restoration reserves with automatic activation, and for the creation of the European mFRR platform, respectively.

Other key topics that have been addressed during the conference have been: PPAs Structure & Pricing; Business Strategies; RES Policy & Markets; Regional Updates; Energy Trading; Grid & Storage; and Heating & Cooling.

CyberGrid has sponsored the event, organized by RE-Source Hub Bulgaria; the Association for Production, Storage and Trading of Electricity (APSTE); and the Bulgarian Wind Energy Association (BGWEA); with the support of RE-Source Platform.