News

‹ BACK

R&D NESTER PRESENTS REGIONAL CASES RESULTS IN FLEXPLAN PROJECT’S FINAL WORKSHOP, IN THE PRESENCE OF EUROPEAN STAKEHOLDERS

 

R&D Nester was present at the final workshop of the FlexPlan project, held in Brussels, Belgium, on the 14th of February 2023. The workshop intended to present the main results of the project to several European stakeholders, such as System Operators and Regulatory Entities.  

The FlexPlan project aims at establishing a new grid planning methodology considering the opportunity to introduce new storage and flexibility resources in electricity transmission and distribution grids as an alternative to building new grid elements. The methodology is tested into 6 regional cases covering most parts of Europe, for realistic pan-European scenarios in 2030, 2040, and 2050.

The FlexPlan methodology consists of three main steps, depicted below:

  • Obtaining the initial input data by gathering information about grid models and scenario time series for each regional case
  • Solving the optimal power flow (OPF) for the non-expanded grid, identifying the potentially profitable investments (candidates) to be processed into the grid expansion planning (GEP) tool, selecting among traditional grid reinforcements, storage units or flexible loads
  • Solving the GEP problem by using the output from the OPF and candidates that were obtained in the previous step. 

One of the main novelties introduced by the methodology is that, instead of analyzing a new investment at a time, it analyses all the pre-processed candidates at once, by determining the combination that minimizes the sum of capital and operational expenditures. Worth mentioning is that among the costs, environmental costs such as carbon footprint and air quality are considered as well, taking an important step forward with regard to state-of-the-art grid planning tools.

The optimization to be solved consists of a large Mixed Integer Linear Problem (MILP), which becomes numerically tractable due to the usage of decomposition techniques, i.e. Benders decomposition and decomposition between transmission and distribution planning. The MILP is solved by the FlexPlan planning tool, which was developed using state-of-art technologies and is capable to run complex simulations using stochastic optimization. The figure below gives an overview of the FlexPlan tool's architecture.

As mentioned above, the FlexPlan methodology and tool are validated on 6 European regional cases, being Iberian, France&BeNeLux, Italian, Balkan, Germany&Switzerland&Austria, and Nordic. R&D Nester is the leader of the related work package, named "Regional cases and assessment of advantages over traditional planning", and is hence responsible for the management and coordination of the testing activities of all regional cases.

During the final workshop, Aleksandr Egorov, a researcher from R&D Nester, pitched the presentation "FlexPlan Regional Cases", where he highlighted the results of the simulations of each regional case and extracted comparisons and conclusions. Among the main results, which will be further analyzed for the regulatory analysis within the project, it emerged that flexibility investments, i.e. storage units and flexible loads, are frequently approved by the tool, and may thus be considered in the future as both an alternative or a complementary option to traditional grid reinforcements, depending on how severe is the potential local grid congestion.

For more information:

 

FLEXPLAN Project @ R&D Nester website

FLEXPLAN project website

Ver todas as newsletters