Regulatory Matters Affecting Distribution Planning with Distributed Generation

Session 6 : Challenges for DOSs in new business environments - Block 2 – Development of regulation: paper no. 0358published_or_final_versio

Service Orientation and the Smart Grid state and trends

The energy market is undergoing major changes, the most notable of which is the transition from a hierarchical closed system toward a more open one highly based on a “smart” information-rich infrastructure. This transition calls for new information and communication technologies infrastructures and standards to support it. In this paper, we review the current state of affairs and the actual technologies with respect to such transition. Additionally, we highlight the contact points between the needs of the future grid and the advantages brought by service-oriented architectures.

Remuneration Assessment of a VPP Providing Distribution Capacity Services

A Distribution System Operator (DSO) might consider a capacity contract as a planning alternative to defer grid investments. A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) might be able to provide such capacity and change its production as requested by the DSO. This article presents an assessment of the impact of this type of distribution capacity contract (DCC) on VPP's remuneration. This assessment is done by comparing the optimal production / bidding strategy which maximize its profit, under presence or absence of these contracts. The impact of intermittent generation and storage while evaluating these scenarios will be investigated as well. A stochastic unit commitment will be used to determine the VPP's strategy under uncertainties from wind power, load, market prices, and the requested power by the DSO. The model showed that the VPP involvement in distribution capacity contracts can improve its remuneration when certain types of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) are used to provide the service

An assessment of the European electricity market reform options and a pragmatic proposal

The current European energy crisis, caused to a large extent by the unlawful invasion of Ukraine by Russia, has renewed calls for a deep reform of the European electricity market. In this paper, we look at the alternatives proposed for the reform of the European electricity market, analysing their advantages and disadvantages, and we put forward a specific proposal for the reform. We focus mostly on measures directed at the wholesale generation market, although we also propose some changes that we believe will also be needed at the retail level. Emergency measures to tackle the current energy crisis, which are not necessarily consistent with the long-term reform and should definitely not determine the long-term design of the European electricity market, are very briefly assessed in an annex, including their compatibility with this long-term reform