FINLAND: Demonstration of provision of flexibility services from distributed LV or MV assets

09.09.2019

Partners
Helen Ltd., Helen Electricity Network Ltd. (third party), VTT

Technical aspects

  • Aggregation of small distributed assets to the TSO’s ancillary services and for DSO’s reactive power compensation needs
  • Development of a set of forecasting tools to estimate the available flexibility of the LV/MV assets for various markets
  • Development of suitable interfaces to connect the small distributed assets to the aggregation platform
  • Technical proof of concept for a DSO reactive power market
  • The low voltage flexible resources in the demonstration are customer scale batteries, public EV charging stations, electric heating loads via AMR meters
  • The medium voltage flexible resources in the demonstration are an industrial scale BESS, a PV power plant

Innovative aspects of the demonstration

  • Development of forecasting, optimisation and aggregation of flexibility capacity from manifold small resources and trading the flexibility on the TSO ancillary markets
  • Proof of concept for a new market mechanism to manage the reactive power in the TSO/DSO connection point
  • Increased use of market driven concepts to support the operation of transmission and distribution networks

Main challenges

In the Nordic electricity system, the amount of intermittent capacity is rapidly increasing and greater flexibility and applicable solutions for high voltage grid stability are needed. In the Finnish demonstration, a novel approach is demonstrated where small distributed resources are aggregated to be traded by an aggregator on the TSO’s existing markets and for the DSO’s reactive power compensation needs. To respond to the increasing RES penetration in the Nordic power system, more flexibilities are needed. The main objective is to demonstrate full value chain performance and cost competitiveness of harnessing small distributed resources for the benefit of power system stability.