Project partners confirmed with pilot tests that demand response and distributed generation units can provide flexibility and help to balance the frequency in the power system.
The final conference of the 4-year Horizon 2020 co-financed project FutureFlow took place on Tuesday, 15 October, in Vienna at the premises of the Energy Community Secretariat. At the beginning of the conference Uroš Salobir, director of the Strategic Innovation Department at ELES and coordinator of the FutureFlow project, greeted more than 70 participants. He stressed that FutureFlow can solve the challenge of energy transition through gas and excessive investment in storage
by activating distributed sources. “Key for the success is connecting the new flexibility sources across the borders of EU member states and the existence of different platforms for the aggregation of those sources. If we are to put these solutions into practice as soon as possible and thus contribute to the achievement of the EU 2050 decarbonisation goals, close cooperation of technical experts and decision-makers will be required, as well as changes in our mentality,” concluded Salobir.
Director of the Energy Community Secretariat Janez Kopač outlined the state of play in the field of European market integration and the plans for the future. He emphasized that the results of the FutureFlow project will soon be used in real life, as the introduction of the developed solutions will make electricity consumers’ lives easier and contribute to the achievement of EU greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Martin Povh, representative of the ACER, discussed regulatory perspective on involvement of prosumers into the balancing market. He stressed that access to the energy market must be guaranteed to all sources of flexibility and it should be possible to integrate them in a larger area. We must also enable that the same flexibility could be used at different markets or for different services. So to enable consumers to participate in the energy markets as easily as possible. "The challenge, however, is to shape the market so, that flexibility can be applied where it reaches the highest market value," said Povh.
Consumers are prepared to become active consumers
Rok Lacko from GEN-I said they managed to acquire 96 active consumers in Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Romania with 50 MW of capacity to offer flexibility that were prepared to take part in pilot tests. “During the one-year period of more than 300 hours of testing, we were able to prove that the participation of active consumers in providing an automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve is technically possible,” Lacko said. In order to participate in the pilot tests, active consumers actually had to adapt the technical and business processes of their core business, and spent many working hours. “Consumers who decided to participate in the pilot tests were those, who believe that active consumers can be part of the solution to the transition to low-carbon society,” Lacko said. The design, course of the pilot tests and their results were presented more detailed by Andreja Ivartnik Kanduč from the Elektroinštitut Milan Vidmar (EIMV). She pointed out that most DR&DG units can’t participate on the market alone, but need an aggregator to do so.
Philippe Vassilopoulos (EPEX Spot), Sven Kaiser (E-control), Boštjan Korošec (Talum) and Zoran Vujasinović (EKC) discussed at the roundtable about the role of the prosumers in the future power system.
Platforms will enable aggregation of DR&DG units and their participation at the flexibility market
As part of the project, 3E, cyberGRID and SAP upgraded their existing platforms, which enable cross-border aggregation and activation of flexibility resources, and also developed a regional balancing and redispatching platform and linked it to upgraded platforms.
Platform for the aggregation of distributed generation and demand response was presented by Andraž Andolšek from cyberGRID, the operation of the regional balancing and redispatching platform was presented by Lucian Moldovanu from SAP, and Karel De Brabandere from 3E presented the role of RES forecasting in the balancing process.
Representatives of the electricity transmission system operators (Alexander Stimmer from APG, Matjaž Dolinar from ELES, Evelin Kiss from Mavir and Doina Ilisiu from Transelectrica) discussed the current situation and development of system services as an opportunity for final customers. Their key finding was that the current situation in the field of system services is very different in all four countries, and they all agreed that many changes are happening that would significantly change the system services market in the future.
“FutureFlow is certainly a success story”, said Carlo Degli Esposti, who moderated the event “because it differs from other European projects in that the partners managed to involve businesses and small RES generating units into real time pilot tests”. Project partners have proven that these units can be a reliable source of flexibility that can help electricity transmission system operators ensure balance in the power system and thus secure power supply.
More about project and its results at www.futureflow.eu.
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