FLEXGRID - DEVELOPMENT AND COMPARISON OF DISTRIBUTION NETWORK FLEXIBILITY MARKET ARCHITECTURES

The goal of FLEXGRID [3] is to facilitate energy sector stakeholders (DSOs, TSOs, producers, retailers, flexibility providers) to: i) easily and effectively create advanced Energy Services (ESs), ii) interact in a dynamic and efficient way with their environment (electricity grid) and the rest of the market stakeholders, and, iii) automate and optimize the planning and operation of their ESs. In this way, FLEXGRID envisages secure, sustainable, competitive, and affordable ESs. In order to facilitate bottom-up investments, modern smart grids have to cope up with the challenging distribution network management. Thus, FLEXGRID develops flexibility market architectures, which allow DSOs (which it considers as the core of the future smart grid architecture) to: a) integrate through an open market Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in a scalable way and, b) efficiently interact with energy sector stakeholders. More specifically, in this paper we present the predominant flexibility market architectures that FLEXGRID develops. In addition, we discuss their requirements, their advantages, their disadvantages and their compatibility with today's smart grids.