Market architecture for TSO-DSO interaction in the context of European regulation

Following the overall European political goals, massive efforts were recently made to promote an accelerated integration of renewable energy sources (RES) in Europe, creating several operational challenges. One of the key approaches to resolve these is to help harness RESs in an efficient and cost-effective way is to utilise flexibility which can be provided by Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) which include active demand participation, energy storage and electric vehicles. The present paper is based on results and learnings of H2020 project SmartNet (2016-2019), where five coordination schemes for TSO-DSO interaction, necessary for procurement and activation of ancillary services were developed and comparatively evaluated. The paper discusses how different coordination schemes all have specific benefits and attention points related to operation of the TSO and DSO grids, other market participants involved and the market operation in general

Architectures for optimized interactions between TSOs and DSOs : experiences and learnings from SmartNet

Increased levels of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and their participation in provision of Ancillary Services (AS) at both transmission and distribution levels, call for a more advanced dispatching management of distribution networks to transform distribution from a “passive” into an “active” system. Moreover, new market architectures must be developed to enable participation of DERs in energy and AS markets. New operational and trading arrangements will also affect the interface between transmission and distribution networks, which will have to be managed in a coordinated manner between TSOs and DSOs in order to ensure the highest efficiency, effectiveness and security

Architectures for optimised interaction between TSOs and DSOs : compliance with the present practice, regulation and roadmaps

Procurement and activation of resources from distribution network for ancillary services will require new grid organisation for ensuring and improving interaction between TSOs and DSOs. EU H2020 project SmartNet proposes five different architectures or coordination schemes (CSs) that each present a different way of organizing this interaction with a specific set of roles taken by the system operators and detailed market design. The study made a comparative evaluation of these CSs based on realistic scenarios for 2030 and implemented in simulations. The following study made a comprehensive screening of more than 40 documents based on a selection of key topics, which are essential for SmartNet and evaluated how the CSs are aligned with the present national and European policy goals and positions of the key industrial stakeholders. The screening was structured according to a set of so-called topics of interest, which the project considers to be essential for definition of wellfunctioning TSO-DSO interaction. The general conclusion of the study is neither the main hypothesis nor the suggested CSs directly conflict with terms of the EU regulation. However, the regulation does not address several topics, which are crucial for large scale utilisation of Distributed Energy Resources in ancillary services. Without common EU regulations different solutions will develop in the distribution areas, the most diverse and non-harmonized solutions will be implemented in agreement between DSOs and adjoining TSO (e.g. nation- or region-wise under influence of TSO). This will not necessarily hamper the utilisation of local flexibility in the transmission grids, but it will certainly make more difficult the development towards cross-border utilisation of distributed energy resources

Coordinación TSO-DSO para el aprovechamiento de flexibilidad en la red de distribución: Proyecto Smartnet

La descarbonización de los sistemas eléctricos está dificultando la operación de los mismos, en particular en lo que se refiere a la operación de las redes de transporte y distribución. En este contexto, es fundamental una mayor coordinación y cooperación entre los operadores de ambas redes a fin de garantizar la estabilidad del sistema. El proyecto SmartNet ha definido varias alternativas de coordinación entre el TSO y el DSO para el aprovechamiento de recursos conectados a la red de distribución y con capacidad de aportar flexibilidad. Posteriormente, se ha desarrollado un entorno de simulación para evaluar el impacto de las distintas alternativas en un escenario plausible a 2030 en Italia, Dinamarca y España. Cada una de las opciones de coordinación llevará aparejados una serie de costes (especialmente, ligados a los sistemas TICs), pero también aportará distintos beneficios al sistema, por lo que, mediante un análisis coste-beneficio, se puede comparar la bondad de cada una de ellas e identificar las más prometedoras en cada uno de los países objeto de estudio. Con el fin de demostrar la viabilidad tecnológica de las soluciones propuestas, así como para identificar las barreras operativas de las mismas, se han desplegado tres pilotos de demostración, uno en cada país de los anteriormente indicados. La presente comunicación presenta los principales desarrollos y las conclusiones más importantes de este proyecto

Policy Recommendations to Implement and/or Overcome Barriers and Enable TSO-ISO Integration : D6.3

The present document gathers the most important guidelines deriving from the results and the experience of the SmartNet project, and thus is strongly dependent on the project assumptions (e.g. no clear separation between congestion management costs and balancing costs; the scenarios at the 2030 target year for the three studied countries; etc.). All the TSO-DSO coordination schemes that have been assessed within the SmartNet project imagine levels of DSO’s involvement in the System Operation and so of DSO’s responsibility by far larger than what happens today. Thus significant investments in monitoring and control systems are required, as well as a further development of expertise on DSO side (especially for what concerns smaller DSO). Additionally, the so called “fit-and-forget” reinforcement policy (oversizing of networks in order not to have to deal with network “problems”, mainly congestions, at the operation level) that nowadays is the basis of DN “operation” must be surpassed. These policies, in fact, could not unlikely lead some DSOs to underestimate flexibility as a value. As a consequence, the need to invest in implementing monitoring and control system could be undervalued, mainly during the first years, in which the DN monitoring systems have to be deployed and costs would probably overcome benefits

The Innovative FlexPlan Grid-Planning Methodology: How Storage and Flexible Resources Could Help in De-Bottlenecking the European System

The FlexPlan Horizon2020 project aims at establishing a new grid-planning methodology which considers the opportunity to introduce new storage and flexibility resources in electricity transmission and distribution grids as an alternative to building new grid elements, in accordance with the intentions of the Clean Energy for all Europeans regulatory package of the European Commission. FlexPlan creates a new innovative grid-planning tool whose ambition is to go beyond the state of the art of planning methodologies by including the following innovative features: assessment of the best planning strategy by analysing in one shot a high number of candidate expansion options provided by a pre-processor tool, simultaneous mid- and long-term planning assessment over three grid years (2030, 2040, 2050), incorporation of a full range of cost–benefit analysis criteria into the target function, integrated transmission distribution planning, embedded environmental analysis (air quality, carbon footprint, landscape constraints), probabilistic contingency methodologies in replacement of the traditional N-1 criterion, application of numerical decomposition techniques to reduce calculation efforts and analysis of variability of yearly renewable energy sources (RES) and load time series through a Monte Carlo process. Six regional cases covering nearly the whole European continent are developed in order to cast a view on grid planning in Europe till 2050. FlexPlan will end up formulating guidelines for regulators and planning offices of system operators by indicating to what extent system flexibility can contribute to reducing overall system costs (operational + investment) yet maintaining current system security levels and which regulatory provisions could foster such process. This paper provides a complete description of the modelling features of the planning tool and pre-processor and provides the first results of their application in small-scale scenariosThe research leading to these results/this publication received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 86381

SmartNet : H2020 project analysing TSO–DSO interaction to enable ancillary services provision from distribution networks

This study presents an overview of the results obtained during the first year of the SmartNet project, which aims at comparing possible architectures for optimised interaction between transmission system operator (TSOs) and distribution system operator (DSOs), including exchange of information for monitoring as well as acquisition of ancillary services (reserve and balancing, voltage regulation, congestion management), both for local needs and for the entire power system. The results concerning TSO–DSO coordination schemes, market design and information and communication technology (ICT) architectures are shown along with the layout of the three technological pilot projects

TSO-DSO coordination and market architectures for an integrated ancillary services acquisition : the view of the SmartNet project

The energy world is facing major challenges as fossil fuel generation is replaced with renewable generation, which is often characterised by variable behaviour. This increases the need for resources to be used to guarantee frequency stability, congestion management, voltage regulation and power quality. At the same time, an increasing number of flexible demand and storage systems is located at distribution level. These resources could potentially be available to provide network services if they are aggregated effectively. To achieve this, however, the roles of the diverse network stakeholders – transmission systems operators (TSOs), distribution systems operators (DSOs) and aggregators – should be reshaped. In tandem with this, the way real-time electricity markets are organised also needs to be adapted to reflect the new operating environment. The project SmartNet (smartnet-project.eu/) compares five different TSO-DSO interaction schemes and different real-time market architectures with the aim of finding out which one could deliver the best compromise between costs and benefits for the system. An ad-hoc-developed platform is used to carry out simulations on three benchmark countries – Italy, Denmark and Spain Conclusions are drawn on possible regulatory gaps both at European and national level. A Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is implemented to compare the costs needed to implement the five TSO-DSO coordination schemes (e.g. to improve the system ICT) with the benefits drawn by the system. In this way, the SmartNet project aims at answering the following key questions: how should real-time markets be optimally organised for enabling flexible generation and load to provide their contribution to system services? which interaction scheme between a TSO and a DSO would prove the most efficient one? What concrete economic benefits could the system draw from this? what is the trade-off between these benefits and the extra costs for ICT deployment to implement these new schemes? what regulatory impact could all of this have on the present European and national regulation? which technological solutions could make it possible to realise a seamless monitoring and control of distributed energy resources (DERs), typically located in distribution? The present paper summarizes the achievements of SmartNet during the first two project years. Main focus is on the set-up of the simulation platform and on the modelling of the different components (transmission and distribution networks, ancillary services markets, aggregation processes, system regulations). The main information related to the expected 2030 Italian scenario (which will be object of simulation and cost-benefit analysis assessment later in the project) will be provided together with some preliminary reflections on ICT constraints and regulatory implications

Cost-benefit Analysis of the Selected National Cases : D4.3

The main objective of the SmartNet project is to provide optimised architectures for Transmission System Operator (TSO) – Distribution system operator (DSO) interaction [1][2]. Such optimisation must take into account the economic behaviour of each different coordination scheme (CS) and, thus, a costbenefit analysis (CBA) is of utmost importance. Since the main objective of this deliverable is the analysis of the CSs from an economic perspective, an exhaustive definition of these CSs has not been included in it. However, sections from 5.3.1 to 5.3.4 show a brief overview of their main characteristics. For a more detailed information on the CSs definition, please see SmartNet deliverable 1.3 [1]. The CBA is oriented to identify the impacts at system-level (also called “macro-level analysis”), since the aim of the economic assessment was to identify which CS provides more efficient results in each country. Additionally, coordination schemes must also allow the involved actors to have a profitable business case, that is, that costs and benefits are properly allocated among them, which required a business-level analysis (also called “micro-level analysis”). In order to carry out such CBA, an ad-hoc simulation platform was developed [3], where different scenarios were analysed for the three countries where SmartNet focuses: Italy, Denmark and Spain [4]. The flexibility market considered in the SmartNet project, which is called “Integrated Reserve Market”, is aimed at solving real-time imbalances and congestions between gate closure of intraday markets and real time until the opening of the next intraday market session [2], [3], [4], [5]. Its operation time is compatible with the timings of existing manual Frequency Restoration Reserve (mFRR) and Replacement Reserve (RR) markets [6], depending on the country. Although more details can be found in [2], for simplification purposes, the reader can understand that Integrated Reserve Market, SmartNet market, tertiary regulation market and mFRR market are the same kind of market. Likewise, automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR) market can be assumed to be the same as secondary regulation market. The results obtained in the simulation environment were the core input for the CBA described in this report. However, these results required an appropriate methodology to be applied. In a first step, a review of the literature related to economic assessment methodologies was performed, with a view to select the metrics to be considered within the CBA described in this report. The CBA is an integral part of the long-term analysis performed for the three countries considered within SmartNet. In parallel to the development of the simulation software [3] and the definition of the 2030 scenarios [4], the most appropriate metrics were selected. Then, based on the results of simulations, which were also used for the laboratory tests [7], metrics were calculated and monetised to feed the system-wide CBA. The value chain was identified in parallel to the system-wide CBA, so that some guidelines on how to run a business-level CBA could also be extracted

DC Grids : Motivation, Feasibility and Outstanding Issues : Status Report for the European Commission Deliverable : D5.4

Wind energy is already a mainstay of clean power generation in Europe, with over 100GW of capacity installed so far, and another 120GW anticipated by 2020 according to various analysts. Much of this capacity is expected to be installed offshore, as it is a windier and the source is steadier compared to onshore wind energy. Hence, offshore wind has been envisaged as making a critical contribution to Europe’s demand for electrical energy and to minimising the carbon emissions associated with meeting that demand