Main findings can be summarized in the following eleven points:
• Traditional TSO-centric schemes could stay optimal if distribution networks don’t show significant congestion not unlikely in near-future scenarios, since distribution grid planning was (and still is) affected by the fit-and-forget reinforcements policy. In a first period, costs to implement monitoring and control systems within distribution networks could result higher than the effect of over-investments inefficiencies due to the old fit and forget philosophy. This could engender resistance in some DSOs to consider flexibility as a value. This could also call for a revision of present remuneration schemes for DSOs’ investments, so that they can claim OPEX and not only CAPEX.
• More advanced centralized schemes incorporating distribution constraints show higher economic performances but their performance could be undermined by big forecasting errors, which could bring them to take wrong decisions.
• Decentralized schemes are usually less efficient than centralized ones because the two-step process introduces undue rigidities. Scarcity of liquidity and potential impact of local market power, along with extra constraints introduced to avoid counteracting actions between local congestion market and balancing market (e.g. increasing system imbalance while solving local congestion) furthermore negatively affect economic efficiency of decentralized schemes.
• Local congestion markets should have a “reasonable” size and guarantee a sufficient number of actors are in competition in order to prevent scarcity of liquidity and exercise of local market power. For that, small DSOs should pool-up in order to create a common congestion management market: too many small local markets would increase ICT costs and reduce competition, with detrimental effects.
• Ensuring level playing field in the participation of distributed resources (especially industrial loads) to the tertiary market means to be able to incorporate into the market products some peculiarities of such resources (loads or generators) without which it is nearly impossible for them to participate. This could imply to enable complex bids or other sophisticated products.
Concerning exploitation, a plan was produced by Task 7.4 (D7.6). This deliverable, created during the last project year with an important participation from the industrial partners members of the consortium, puts in highlight five actual exploitable platforms produced by SmartNet:
- The simulation platform,
- ICT and architectures for each of the three project pilots,
- The ICT Platform assessed in the WP3 of the project.
Particularly worth of mentioning, the results of the Pilot A (Italian Pilot) were publicly declared as of national interest by the Italian Regulator ARERA during the final SmartNet workshop (Arona, May 2019). Furthermore, the final achievements of the SmartNet project as presented in the final project workshop in Arona are extensively mentioned in the recent consultation document “Testo Integrato del Dispacciamento Elettrico (TIDE) – orientamenti complessivi” (document 322/2019/EEL – points 3.65 and 3.66 on pages 56-57).
Two new Horizon2020 projects, both started in January 2019 will take an important heritage of the SmartNet project: INTERRFACE and CoordiNet.
Finally, the newly awarded Horizon2020 project FlexPlan, availing itself of the same coordinating person as the SmartNet project (as well as many partners in common), will still tackle the topic of “flexibility” and “TSO-DSO cooperation”, yet from the system planning point of view.
