Imbalances costs of small scale renewable not dispatchable power plants in the Italian electricity market

The dispatching in electrical systems always has to face the problem of instantaneous balance between produced power and consumed power. In recent decades, with the advent of distributed generation, especially from non-programmable renewable sources, dispatching has become increasingly more difficult, and more and more attention was paid to the opportunity to limit the imbalances between foreseen production profiles and those actually measured, by the payment of a fee. In the Italian electricity market, the legislation in this regard is evolving rapidly, especially in terms of different ways to calculate the imbalance fee. The paper presents an analysis of imbalances in the Italian case and exams the legislation in force and the proposed changes by the Italian Authority. Results show that there are heavy penalizations with these changes, especially for the balancing operators who manage production units from non-programmable renewable sources.