EU policy makers have set ambitious targets for the decarbonisation of the energy system, demanding increased levels of energy efficiency and world leading levels of renewable energy technologies. By 2050, electricity use is estimated to increase from 20% of the overall EU...
EU policy makers have set ambitious targets for the decarbonisation of the energy system, demanding increased levels of energy efficiency and world leading levels of renewable energy technologies.
By 2050, electricity use is estimated to increase from 20% of the overall EU energy use today to 40% of energy needs. Currently, Renewable Energy Sources from Electricity (RES-E) accounts for approximately 30% of overall electricity demand. By 2030 the EU have set a target to increase this to over 50%. This represents a seismic challenge to how we will operate the pan-European power system of the future.
The primary increase in RES-E will come from technologies such as wind and solar. Due to their intermittent and non-synchronous characteristics, power system operators must devise solutions which ensure stability and reliability of the future power system at all time. These solutions can be described as System Services and Flexibility which address stability, power system resilience, balancing of load, increasing needs for reserves and flexibilities in existing and new generation sites. The scale of non-synchronous technologies on the future power system relative to large thermal power stations will results in a system with less inertia and less operational capacities for dispatching or for restoration. Finally, the power system of the future is becoming more decentralised and therefore there is greater need for cross sectoral coordination of the power system between transmission to distribution level. Consequently, there is a need to achieve greater levels of digitalization of the power system to exchange and manage data closer to real-time between producers, consumers, system and market operators is an imperative.
The overall objective of the EU-SysFlex project is to facilitate the provision of effective and sufficient level of system services and power system flexibility to ensure that the objective of 50% RES-E by 2030 is met. This requires defining the right amount of flexibility and system services to support transmission system operators using a threefold approach. Firstly, the technical needs of the pan-European system will be defined for scenarios with more than 50% RES-E in will be identified and translated to services and products to be delivered in an enhanced market design. Secondly, the electricity market design and regulation should be augmented to efficiently and effectively procure the appropriate combination of these system services. Thirdly, implicit and explicit barriers to competitive forces being applied need to be removed.
EU-SysFlex will represent an opportunity for society from both the perspective of climate change mitigation and a diver for innovation, competitiveness of our industries and job creation. The later impacts of the project will lead to material improvements to meet the desired world leading levels of RES while maintaining the level of resilience expected by consumers and society.
The EU-SysFlex project consortium is represented right across the electricity sector, consisting of 34 partners from 15 European countries. The consortium consists of TSOs, DSOs, generation companies, technology providers, research institutes, academia an aggregator and retailers. The project consortium is supported by an advisory board consisting of industry representative bodies ENTSO-E, E.DSO, Wind Europe, Eurelectric, USEF, IWEA as well a number of European and International TSOs and European DSOs.
During the first reporting period, the members of the consortium have contributed with their work to reach the overall goals of the project.
The partners participating in WP2 have worked in collaboration to provide a set of technical shortfalls. These are being studied in further detail and will serve as a base to develop the needed flexibility of the system. The results are the basis to develop new scenarios and models for further simulating the impact of high RES penetration on the EU power system.
The WP3 partners have led the recommendations for enhancing the market and regulation framework to enable an efficient and effective procurement of flexibility services. The seven industrial scale demonstrators have worked on providing their Business Use Cases in collaboration with WP3, providing their KPIs with WP10 and describing all their specifications in their respective Demo WPs (WP5, WP7, WP8, WP9). They have been contributed to set up the demonstrations, securing software and hardware developments, communication channels, equipment acquisition, installation, etc. to allow tests to start in 2019. The EU-SysFlex demonstrations are focusing on complementary aspects of improving system flexibility in power, voltage and transfer capacity with high RES penetration.
WP4 focuses on going one step closer to the market and the operational integration of these services in the system operator’s tools and procedures. A first WP4 report provided extended feedback from the Irish Qualifying Trials for new technologies to provide System Operator Requirements and the national experiments to provide insight on communication enhancement with Remote Terminal Units, but also on the capabilities of Demand Side Response and of new sources to provide steady state reactive power.
In order to define the KPIs of the Demonstrations a literature review has been made, to build on existing available flexibility roadmaps. However, it is still early in the project and the roadmap cannot really start without solid results. The results from the demonstrations will need to be first analysed in terms of replicability, scalability and reliability at European level. An essential aspect of new flexibilities is also their dependence on the digitalization and data management in the power systems. Recommendations will be issued later in the project by WP5, which, in addition to describing data exchange model and use cases, has started the studies on cybersecurity, privacy, data collection and processing, and interoperability for data exchanges.
As a part of WP11, the project has participated to several conferences and events, from IEA to Sustainable Energy Week, as well as BRIDGE initiative meetings, providing a large visibility to the project and its first results. A methodology for exploitation has been defined and a kick-off of Exploitation Board took place.
The main ambition of EU-SysFlex is to go beyond the current state of the art by demonstrating a set of innovative solutions that foster the appropriate balance and development of needed system services and flexibility. The outcome from this will simply be a better balance of investment in complementary system services providing new technologies. To achieve this innovation it is necessary to remove existing barriers to allow these technologies to be securely and reliably dispatched and operated in the future. This will challenge existing TSO and DSO processes and procedures.
The ultimate ambition of EU- Sysflex is to enhance the design and operation of the energy market to drive the complementary investment in system service capability that will realise the world leading policy objectives of the EU.
More info: http://eu-sysflex.com/.