EUniversal is a research project funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon program. The consortium brings together 19 partners from 8 different European countries providing a multi-stakeholder approach that covers the whole value chain of energy systems: DSOs, R&D centres specialised in the technology applied in the solutions, industrial suppliers for smart grids, aggregators/retailers, market platform operators, technology integrators, ICT developers. The scope of the project is to develop solutions to ensure the effective implementation of an interoperable flexibility ecosystem across Europe.
Pilot areas in Germany, Poland, and Portugal were selected.
The German Demonstrator coordinated by E.ON and the German DSO Mitnetz Strom “Demonstration of congestion management using market-based flexibility in the LV grid” covers field tests of
- Smart grid tools for grid congestion detection and flexibility need quantification and
- Market-based flexibility service selection and activation via the Universal Market Enabling Interface (UMEI).
The UMEI is an agnostic, adaptable, and modular set of APIs that have been developed within the EUniversal project to enable DSOs and FSPs to connect to several flexibility market platforms and to support future system operation standards towards the implementation of flexibility markets.
The Deliverable D8.2 “Specifications of test scenarios within the German Demonstrator” describes the system integration of each smart grid tool and market platform with the Mitnetz system. The test scenarios examine the reliability and accuracy of each tool considering the available data and data quality. Simulation-based flexibility trading scenarios on the NODES market platform between the DSO Mitnetz Strom and the aggregator Centrica via the UMEI prove the operational reliability between the systems.
Lessons learned:
- The precision and accuracy of the smart grid tools will help to indicate potential congestions in the LV grid
- Enhanced data availability and data quality in the future will significantly improve the accuracy of precisely determining the location of the congestion and the respective need for flexibility
- Flexibility procurement via NODES market platform and the UMEI proves the applicability of the new digital flexibility value chain
- The installation of HEMS and BEMS and interfaces need to be simplified and standardized to effectively support flexibility options in the smart-meter roll-out
- Missing incentives and existing regulatory barriers such as the grid tariff structure, the taxation scheme, flexibility asset categorization, and lack of transparency affect customer participation and hence the provision of flexibility by asset owners
