This Report is an integral part of the documentation of the System Research activities envisaged by the ‘Three-Year Implementation Plan 2019-2021’ within the project ‘Tools and models, including sectoral, for energy and electricity scenarios, suitable for the evolution of the system – Analysis of the evolution of markets and regulation.’

Project 2.1 includes four related EU projects, funded under the Horizon2020 program. For two of these, RSE is Project Coordinator (SmartNet and FlexPlan), while in the other two (ASSIST2gether and INTERRFACE) RSE is one of the key members of the consortium.

This report contains a brief summary of the aims of each of the four projects, followed by a brief description of the main results achieved during 2019 in the activities with direct participation by RSE.

ASSIST2gether is a 36-month European project that aims to engage consumers actively in the energy market and positively change their behavior and encourage policy makers at all levels to address energy poverty issues.

To achieve its objectives, the project intends to create a network of innovative professionals, called ‘Home Energy Advisors’ (HEA), to support vulnerable consumers. RSE is responsible for developing actions on the ground by these HEAs to support vulnerable consumers and thus provide tangible results that can be used and replicated by other projects in different contexts to address energy poverty issues.

The new FlexPlan project, coordinated by RSE, aims to establish a new planning methodology for transmission and distribution networks, considering the opportunity of introducing new storage elements and exploiting potential flexibility elements in electricity transmission and distribution networks as an alternative to building new lines. A new tool will be developed that extends current planning methodologies with innovative elements to make them suitable to address effectively the planning process in the future. This tool will be used to analyze six regional cases covering almost all of Europe, in order to understand how storage and flexibility can contribute to reducing planning investments. The project will end with the formulation of guidelines for use by European Regulatory Authorities and Network Operators.

RSE is responsible for task 3.1 of the INTERRFACE project and for the deliverable 3.1 ‘Services design based on the customer, grid and market player perspective,’ which formally defines the interactions between the different actors involved in the provision of ancillary services. The deliverable was built starting from an analysis of the services implemented in different European energy systems and in previous European H2020 projects; this was followed by gathering and analyzing the needs expressed by the pilot projects developed in INTERRFACE; from the services thus identified, a reduced list of common services was obtained, whose implementation under different market schemes was analyzed.

The SmartNet project aims to compare different architectures for optimized TSO-DSO interaction in managing the purchase of ancillary services from entities connected to distribution networks. An ad hoc simulation platform is built and different TSO-DSO interaction modalities are compared with reference to three national cases on a 2030 time horizon (Italy, Denmark, Spain); this simulation platform is then implemented in the laboratory (hardware-in-the-loop) to test the performance of real controller devices. Three physical pilots were also developed to demonstrate the monitoring and control by the TSO of flexible resources in distribution networks and services (Italian pilot) and services that can be provided by exploiting the thermal inertia of indoor swimming pools (Danish pilot) or the distributed storage elements present in the radio-base stations of telecommunication networks (Spanish pilot).