A co-simulation of flexibility market based congestion management in Northern Germany

This paper analyses a flexibility market based approach to prevent grid congestions and reduce costs for feedin management. A method and implementation are presented to simulate this local flexibility market for the district Brunsbüttel in Northern Germany. The analysed approach introduces a regional auction to trade energy in a way that day-ahead forecasted congestions are minimised by coordinating the flexibility potential of the area. To quantify the potential of the mechanism a cosimulation was set up, using the OpSim co-simulation framework. The results show that the mechanism solves 100% of congestions at the cost of 74% of conventional feed-in management. Local flexibility assets, excluding curtailed wind farms, manage to prevent 16% of congestions. The concept seems particularly attractive for large combined heat and power plants. Additional 91 MW flexibility would be required in order to completely avoid curtailment, corresponding to a ratio of 0.7 MW flexibility per megawatt installed wind capacity.