"The FutureFlow project helped to strengthen the role of active consumers at the flexibility market
The key result of the FutureFlow project is to allow the extraction of all flexibility resources available in the power system. This extraordinary result helps the TSOs to hit the goal to offer direct market access to all balancing resources and, by this, they confirm their position as the most reliable ""system frequency manager"" also for the future. The evolution of the energy market towards a system with bulk generation from geographically concentrated wind and solar power and with a large part of it connected to voltage levels out of direct TSO control require solutions like FutureFlow to process the tremendously higher number of inputs and outputs from which the frequency signal will be dependent.
By FutureFlow, the electrical energy market is achieved in its ultimate form. The solution brings the ultimate transparency on the available system flexibility, leading to the completion of dimensions of the energy market unachieved until now by gathering full control on all balancing resources at real-time, cross border and cross voltage level. This solution compresses the features of energy market coupling for day-ahead and intraday into the timeframe of a few minutes. They are integrated with the latest achievements reached by TSOs for optimizing the calculation and sharing of balancing resources between control zones. The sharing of resources is not limited to the resources available at transmission level but can potentially reach all distributed generation and demand side resources connected to the grid, at whatever voltage level. Additionally, the FutureFlow algorithm allows a co-optimization of balancing and redispatch: this feature allows supporting the welfare maximization across all markets also for heavily congested systems.
As a direct consequence, the flexibility price has finally a clear chance to become the real price of wholesale electricity for the European market. If unconstrained marginal pricing for balancing and imbalances is chosen as a standard pricing practice, the view on the real volume of generation and demand available to modulate the frequency signal allows sending clear market prices about how much and what generation is needed.
In this project, all possible kinds of VPP structures have been tested. This has created an extremely composite library of business cases and solutions that can be further industrialized for applications in areas where the flex potential of e.g. small hydro has been remaining largely untapped, thus allowing the fast and quick inclusion of the VPP flexibility into the market.
The extension of this solutions at European scale offers an additional tool to improve the process to define the security perimeter of the CGM (common grid model) - no more operational points perfectly stable but completely out of the assessed security perimeter, or other comparable unexpected results. The tool could furthermore support an increased precision for cross zonal capacity calculations - with border adapting more flexibly to the congestions (no matter if internal or cross-border) for each 15-minutes market terms, as well as for calculating well-rounded cross-border cost allocations for PCI - including also valuation on balancing markets.
Thanks to its features, FutureFlow can become a cornerstone solution for the ultimate market integration of distributed generation and demand side and becoming a key tool for grid operators to tackle the challenges of the evolving European power system."
