Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FutureFlow (Designing eTrading Solutions for Electricity Balancing and Redispatching in Europe)

Teaser

Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (APG from Austria, ELES from Slovenia, MAVIR from Hungary and Transelectrica from Romania), together with power system experts from multiple research institutions, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity...

Summary

Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (APG from Austria, ELES from Slovenia, MAVIR from Hungary and Transelectrica from Romania), together with power system experts from multiple research institutions, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity providers, joined effort to design a unique regional cooperation scheme that aims at designing Balancing and Redispatching markets and open it to new sources of flexibility and supporting these sources to participate on such markets competitively.
The project design: The initial challenge in the FutureFlow project was/is to design and configure cross-border balancing and redispatching mechanism based on a harmonized set of requirements for business service providers within selected power systems characterized by rather varying maturity in terms of the development of their balancing markets and technical capabilities for balancing. The challenge is to design FutureFlow balancing mechanism that would preserve balancing performance; however still offers products flexible enough to enable participation of flexible resources in the balancing process.
Prototype for the aggregation platform of demand response and distributed generation: By means of a prototype aggregation solution and renewable generation forecasting techniques, flexibility providers – commercial and industrial (C&I) consumers providing demand response (DR) and distributed generators (DG) – are enabled to provide products for balancing services. Retailers act as flexibility aggregators and pool the resource in order to provide the products required by the TSO. The analysis of FutureFlow project clearly shows the limited potential of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) participation in balancing markets caused by their uncertain nature which causes them unfavourable product requirements both on procurement and activation timeframes. Based on a field survey, case studies and theoretical analysis, the DR&DG flexibility has been identified to exist in a wide area of devices and processes in the industry, tertiary and household sectors. In Austria, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia 318 MW of DR & DG potential for flexibility services has been identified.
Prototype of the regional balancing and redispatching platform: The main component of the prototype platform is the common activation function (CAF) tailored to deal with congested borders and optimized to overcome critical intra-regional barriers. The CAF will be implemented as a cloud solution of a prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform.
For TSOs ensuring system stability and integrity is of the highest importance. In order to carry out realistic live tests of the platform and at the same time not interfere with live operational Load Frequency Control (LFC) systems of TSOs, FutureFlow partners designed advanced pilot test environment. The test environment will host parallel test TSO environments interacting with regional balancing and redispatching platform and therefore enabling the most realistic tests of the prototype, including very important cyber security aspect.
Field pilot tests: Use cases of growing complexity are to be pilot-tested, going from the involvement of DR and DG into national balancing markets to cross border competition between flexibility providers. Based on past experience with tertiary reserve and extensive field survey, participating C&I consumers and DG are expected to provide close to 40 MW of secondary reserve in the territory of Austria, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia. The aim of the field pilot tests is not just to provide prerequisites that enables participation of those sources but also to validate if and which technologies are actually capable of offering services on the same level of quality as conventional units within an attractive business environment.
It should be emphasised that DR&DG providers expect not only their participation in the pilot tests, but also their inclusion into balancing services a

Work performed

Within the 1st reporting period the requirements for Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Generation (DG) for their participation in flexible balancing services, such as automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR), have been specified as a first step towards the integration of these sources in the FutureFlow field-pilot tests. Further on, the specifications and functionalities for the DR&DG flexibility platform have been prepared and the development of the prototype platform started. Although it has not yet been developed in full, the basic control logic and algorithms have been made available for off-line testing in a simulation environment. The actual pilot tests of both prototype platforms are due in 2018.
Also all the activities targeted at FutureFlow’s next prototype platform, the Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform, have been carried out according to the project’s timeline:
- Cross-border balancing and redispatching mechanisms, including the Common Activation Function (CAF) tailored to congested borders, have been designed and configured.
- The architecture and design specifications for the Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform as a precondition for the platform development have been defined as well as the specifications for the real-time processing function.
- Software development is ongoing. Although initially predicted to be a part of FutureFlow Cloud Platform, the decision to implement common real-time processing function in a more flexible development environment has been taken.
The risk assessment has been performed over the whole FutureFlow architecture according to the Threat, Vulnerability and Risk Analysis methodology. The risk analysis showed that the TSO platforms, located in TSO premises and isolated from public networks, appear to be less at risk than the FutureFlow Cloud Platform, but particular attention should be paid to their external interface connecting those platforms to DR&DG aggregation platforms, as this interface could be used as an entry point for cyberattacks.

Final results

1. The Demand Response & Distributed Generation flexibility platform for aFRR markets
One of the main reasons why smaller flexibility providers do not participate in today’s aFRR markets are the required integration costs for small units. By means of aggregation algorithms and tools, the DR&DG flexibility platform will help to solve this challenge. It will act as a link between a high number of smaller flexibility providers and the TSOs, group flexibilities together, meet TSOs integration rules and provide high security for the power network grid.
2. Prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform with Common Activation Function.
The Prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform with Common Activation Function tailored to congested borders will enable field-pilot tests of a cross-border aFRR balancing energy market with the participation of DR&DG.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.futureflow.eu.