Method for determining the feasibility of grid and ancillary services through smart meter

Abstract

The ongoing decentralisation of the energy system leads to an increasing number of technical units across all sectors. In the future, these components will be required to provide grid and ancillary services and thus gradually take over tasks that were previously provided by a central structure. To ensure a secure and interoperable infrastructure, intelligent metering systems (smart meter or iMSys) that are being rolled out must also be actually deployed. As the services have different technical requirements, these must be compared with the properties of the iMSys infrastructure. Since there are different approaches to the design of the iMSys infrastructure across the European countries, this paper presents with the House of Quality a methodological approach for the systematic comparison of requirements (services) and properties (iMSys) as well as a quantification of the implementation potential of the services. This provides an assessment of the relevance of individual functionalities for the implementation of services and enables the identification of functional gaps. Furthermore, the method is applied to 25 selected services and the different iMSys generations in Germany. This shows that available iMSys are very limited in their support of services (5 out of 25) but this number goes up to 21 with the coming iMSys generations. As a result, the feasibility of services is determined and missing functions are identified that enable the application of all considered services and thus provide the basis for a smart energy system. The method, as presented here for Germany, can be adapted for other countries with the individual framework conditions.