Abstract
Power systems in many countries have recently undergone a significant transition towards renewable and carbon-free generation sources. Those sources pose new challenges to the grid operation due to their intermittency and uncertainty. Consequently, advanced policy strategies and technologies offering new flexibility solutions on the inelastic demand side are required to maintain the reliability of power systems. Given the diversity of situations, legislation and needs across European countries and the varying nature of distribution system operators, this article reviews the deployment of demand side flexibility at national level to identify best practices and main barriers. The analysis concerns European countries of different progress in solutions that leverage flexibility towards offering electricity grid services. The scope is to explore the operation principles of European electricity markets, to assess the participation of emerging flexible resources, and to propose new approaches that facilitate the integration of flexible assets in the distribution grid. The countries reviewed are the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy and Greece. These countries were selected owing to their diversity in terms of generation mix and market design. Barriers for market access of flexibility resources are also identified in order to form relevant country-specific recommendations.
Highlights
Power systems are undergoing deep transformation on the way to clean, decarbonized and more efficient energy generation and consumption mechanisms [1]
In order to allow new resources of demand side flexibility (DSF) to participate in the electricity markets it is necessary to adapt market design through new market players and define new roles or extend the roles of already existing parties
Regulators and system operators are already playing a key role in market design innovation and have a substantial impact on the consolidation of emerging business models, as they can either hinder or help their evolution as a tool to increase flexibility
Summary
Power systems are undergoing deep transformation on the way to clean, decarbonized and more efficient energy generation and consumption mechanisms [1]. As concerns studies on specific country designs on demand side flexibility, few references can be found in some papers and reports (e.g., [48,49]), these are limited to references in specific market segments (e.g., balancing markets [9,38] local flexibility tenders [50]) and solutions that enable demand participation (e.g., flexibility trading platforms [6,51,52], DR [53,54], residential electricity demand [55,56]), and are not presented as an integrated analysis of the whole electricity market design of the country, and do not provide a thorough review of the country progress Within this framework, paper [6] provides a thorough analysis—albeit still narrow in terms of scope—of four pioneering platforms, which are the most advanced in terms of implementing flexibility markets within Europe.
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