Over the last decade, new Community and national energy policies have led to significant changes in the market and the national electricity system, bringing to the surface new critical issues and needs. Under the pressure of technical, economic, environmental and social drivers, the electricity system has taken on a completely different shape, characterized by increasing grid integration of non-programmable renewable generation and more distributed generation, rather than concentrated in a few large power plants.

The European electricity markets are also undergoing a transformation towards a single internal electricity market (IEM): this process, which is currently well advanced in terms of coupling the day-ahead markets, should soon extend to the intraday and balancing and dispatching markets. It is therefore important to assess the impact that the different variables of the European system may have on the national electricity system. One variable with a European dimension is certainly the ETS mechanism. The System Research project “Evolution of interconnected electricity systems and market integration” therefore conducted a sensitivity analysis of the impact of the price of CO2 emission permits on the national system and on trade between the main European producing countries.

Other activities aimed at analyzing the electricity markets have focused on the possible medium- and long-term evolution of the system, its management and the regulatory framework governing its operation. Of particular relevance in this context is RSE’s participation in the Authority’s (AEEGSI – now ARERA) Electricity Dispatching Reform project, with a view to determining the price of imbalances and introducing nodal prices. In this context, scenario analyses were carried out to understand how to calculate an energy price in real time, taking into account the specificities of the Italian electricity market.

Finally, again in the context of the possible evolution of electricity markets, studies were carried out to assess the contribution of new resources to regulation services. The possible participation of electrochemical storage systems, also coupled with non-programmable renewable plants, in the provision of traditional services (primary and secondary frequency regulation) was analyzed. Furthermore, a simplified dynamic model of the electrical system was used to analyze the impact on frequency stability of adding control logics for two new possible services: synthetic inertia and fast primary frequency control.