Over the past decade, new EU and national energy policies have brought about substantial changes in the national power system and the electricity market, and new critical issues and needs have emerged. Driven by technical, economic, environmental and social drivers, the electricity system has changed profoundly, partly due to increasing integration of generation from non-programmable renewable sources and distributed generation in the grid. The ‘Evolution of Interconnected Electric Systems and Market Integration’ project aims to analyse the consequences of these changes on the national electricity system and, more specifically, on the electricity market.

The activities carried out in the previous years of the three-year period revolved around the themes of the evolution and integration of energy markets and new architectures and modalities for the provision of grid services; in 2018 they were continued, deepened and integrated with each other.

Regardingthe evolution and integration of markets, this year’s activities have covered the following aspects of overall system governance:

• analysis of the dispatching service market, including in the light of the entry into force of the ENTSO-E’s ‘Electricity Balancing Network Code’;
• scenarios and simulations of the electricity market to assess the impacts of the development of grid infrastructure envisaged in TERNA’s plans;
• analysis of new models for the capacity market, for improved modelling of dispatching and financial parameters. As regards new architectures and grid service provision methods, the following issues have been analysed this year:
• participation of electrochemical storage systems in the provision of grid services, considering the possible optimisation of profits that may be achieved by acting on the quantities of energy to be offered. The profitability of the offering of a balancing service by an aggregate of electric vehicles was also analysed. Finally, the optimal sizing of a storage system for the simultaneous provision of several services was considered.
• calibration of parameters of new grid services for frequency regulation: technical-economic optimisation of the parameters of the two innovative frequency regulations (fast primary regulation and synthetic inertia) and determination of the maximum admissible penetration level of NPRESs with no physical inertia, beyond which the innovative regulations considered must be introduces.