Energy applications for network planning and congestion management: the SYNERGY project Greek demo

Abstract

The energy system as we know it today is evolving: Increased automation, which facilitates active network management, increased number of distributed energy resources installed into the grid, emerging trends such as demand response, microgrids, energy communities, flexible resources such as heat pumps or electric vehicles, all these shape current power networks and affect the operation and planning philosophy. Flexibility can be leveraged by aggregators to offer balancing and congestion management services to the power system. Then, existing infrastructure could be fully unlocked for normal operating conditions, avoiding or delaying reinforcement of the grid and at the same time allowing system operators to offer uninterrupted power delivery to end consumers at all times. In this context, two energy applications targeting distribution and transmission operators (DSOs and TSOs) are presented with the purpose to offer services and insights to their operational and planning strategies. The first application performs a medium-term assessment, utilizing probabilistic Monte Carlo power flow calculations to locate potential faults and their impact on reliability, and then planning solutions are proposed assuming flexible capacity is used. The second application offers short-term congestion management with flexibility procurement, utilizing generation and demand forecasts and power flow calculations, also proposing a prioritization scheme between DSOs and TSOs. The applications also offer a friendly user-interface, where the user can select actions to be taken and results to be visualized.