Local Markets for Flexibility Trading: Key Stages and Enablers

Abstract

The European energy transition is leading to a transformed electricity system, where Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) will play a substantial role. Renewable Energy Sources (RES) will challenge the key operational obligation of real-time balancing and the need for flexibility will consequently increase. The introduction of a local flexibility market (LFM) would allow the trading of flexibility supplied by both producing and consuming units at the distribution level, providing market access to DERs, a support tool for Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and a value stream for energy suppliers. Aggregators and DSOs for different reasons can enhance the valuation of flexible DERs. Several research papers have assumed aggregators fully interacting with the electricity markets and DSOs contracting services with power system actors. These interactions are still not allowed in many European countries. This article aims to analyze the European regulation to identify the most important enablers and pave the way towards the full exploitation of DER flexibility, culminating in the establishment of an LFM. Therefore, three main stages, emerging from the progressive withdrawal of the current regulatory and market barriers, are identified: (1) enabling the aggregator’s trading, (2) evolution of the DSO’s role, and (3) key-design challenges of an LFM.

Data-Driven Fault Localization in Distribution Systems with Distributed Energy Resources

“…This subsection shows the performance of the proposed method for fault localization in the IEEE-123 node test feeder with 50% DER penetrations. Firstly, based upon the criterion given in Section 3.1, we use the three-phase line as the trunk of the distribution system and roughly divide the IEEE 123-node test feeder into 5 subregions, i.e., subregion 1 to subregion 4 and a trunk subregion (the trunk is the region that contains all nodes that are not included by subregions [1][2][3][4], as shown in Figure 9. Next, we apply the proposed data-driven fault localization strategy to localize the fault in the system.…”

The electricity market design for decentralized flexibility sources

“…At the European Union level, it includes the Third Energy Package of 2009 and Energy Efficiency Directive of 2012, which contain the promotion of smart meters and allow for the introduction of timebased prices (Chase et al, 2017). Lately, the European Commission's Clean Energy Package also provides measures to promote better integration of electricity from renewable sources and support power evolution towards a more intermittent, non-synchronous generation fleet (Meeus & Nouicer, 2018;Minniti et al, 2018;Poncela, 2018 Demand capacity is sold by consumers, directly or through aggregators, to the market or the grid operator. The demand thus competes directly with supply in different market segments.…”

“…Currently it might be the single most crucial factor shaping the business model of decentralized flexibility. In member states other than France and Switzerland, there is no such framework to settle the dispute between aggregators and BRPs (Verhaegen & Dierckxsens, 2016;Minniti et al, 2018; DNV GL, 2017a). The major difficulty for such settlement is to design a baseline for DFS that can well reflect the caused imbalance on BRPs profile by any service activation of DFS.…”

“…Also, it is more acceptable to BRPs because FCR only causes marginal energy imbalance in their profile (Elia, 2017;Verhaegen & Dierckxsens, 2017). At the moment, only the framework from Switzerland allows independent aggregators to have direct contracts with end-users without explicit permission from BRPs: after the activation of flexibility services, the Swiss TSO corrects the position of each BRP considering all the flexibility activation that has modified its position; the BRP then receives compensation based on quarter-hourly day-ahead price (Minniti et al, 2018;Verhaegen & Dierckxsens, 2017). This model allows system operators to correct the imbalance position centrally for BRPs and letting aggregators contract freely with active consumers would be preferred.…”

Distribution Level Aggregator Platform for DSO Support—Integration of Storage, Demand Response, and Renewables

“…From another viewpoint, problems due to DERs propagate to these aggregators via DSO, and then TSO (Pudjianto et al, 2017). The idea in this paper is block this chain to DSO level since aggregators exist at DSO level too (Asimakopoulou and Hatziargyriou, 2018;Minniti et al, 2018). It requires a platform for aggregator at DSO level, with the integration, monitoring, and control capabilities using different market players (Han et al, 2017;Yazdani-Damavandi et al, 2017;Ju et al, 2018;Pasetti et al, 2018).…”