FutureFlow consortium partners held a project kick-off meeting 

Ljubljana, 27-28 January 2016

FutureFlow - Designing eTrading Solutions for Electricity Balancing and Redispatching in Europe

The FutureFlow kick-off meeting took place in Ljubljana where all 12 Consortium partners from 8 European countries, the Project Officer from European Commission Mrs. Mariana Stancheva and representative from ELES CEO Office gathered to launch the project activities. The meeting was led by Mr. Uroš Salobir, Project Coordinator from ELES, who expressed his optimism and eagerness for enabling renewable sources and consumers to contribute to electricity grid stability as never before. 

In the meeting the consortium partners reviewed the project plan of the 4-year project and defined main priorities for the year 2016. The preparation of technical specifications and business models, specifications and studies that are essential for prototyping pilot platforms represent the main challenges for the coming year.    

The FutureFlow will link interconnected control areas of four TSOs of Central-South Europe (ELES, Slovenia; APG, Austria; MAVIR, Hungary; and TRANSELECTRICA, Romania) which today do face increasing challenges to ensure transmission system security. The growing share of renewable electricity units has reduced drastically the capabilities of conventional, fossil-fuel based means to ensure balancing activities and congestion relief through redispatching. There is a need to face future balancing and network security challenges with the help of a more intensive and joint approach at regional level. The project, as recently approved under the horizon 2020 framework of the European Commission, proposes research and innovation activities to validate that consumers and distributed generators can be put in a position to provide balancing and redispatching services in addition to conventional units, within an attractive business environment.

Consortium partners have agreed to jointly explore the combination of two routes to provide solutions to such problems through a unique regional cooperation:

• The design of a regional cross-border techno-economic cooperation scheme: it is tailored to ensure the participation of advanced commercial and industrial consumers, prosumers and distributed renewable generators in the provision of advanced ancillary services in TSO environments with limited flexibility options.

• The development and pilot testing of a comprehensive prototype IT platform and the associated economic model(s) to support this cooperation scheme.

The research and innovation activities involve real energy market players (between 20 and 40 MW of the flexible balancing power services expected to be made available in the control areas of the four TSOs), this in view of:

• Prototyping of innovative flexibility aggregation platforms within all four control zones,

• Prototyping of a regional IT platform enabling access of these flexibility aggregation platforms to the international markets,

• Enabling optimization of relevant functionalities within the TSO environments from the regional perspective,

• Pilot testing of these platforms and connections, based on a set of progressively ambitious use cases involving real electricity market players.

• An ex-post impact analysis is proposed to deliver recommendations for the scaling-up and replication of the most promising use cases.

Besides FutureFlow consortium partners the knowledge and experience will be exchanged with external stakeholders as well via the:

- Advisory Board encompassing research experts, consumers associations, RES and conventional generators associations, retailers, aggregators and regulators to address the critical research questions, the solutions developed the investigated use cases and the scaling up or replicability potential of the prototypes.

- Reference Group of TSOs, which aims at dealing specifically with TSOs issues regarding for instance the links between the FutureFlow