INSIDE THE TOOLBOX
Planning Module
This tool will produce flexible, adaptive network investment strategies that take advantage of demand side flexibility for the provision of network support (i.e., procured by the DSO in ancillary services markets) as a means to maximise network capacity, also considering environmental (e.g., increased losses) and economic impacts (e.g., network support for customers to partake in the markets).
This tool will develop optimized strategies for the transmission network to be adaptively upgraded in consideration of the new sources of uncertainty and flexibility that may emerge in different areas of the network, e.g., distributed RES, storage and MES at the demand side.
This tool will assess the benefits from the installation of TSO/DSO shared technologies (e.g. storage devices) to be managed in a coordinated way to simultaneously provide flexibility to both distribution and transmission networks, thus contributing to postpone investments in as sets replacement/reinforcement.
Operation Module
This tool will characterize and model the life of important network asset components, such as power transformers, exploring techniques that include the characterization of the reliability using fault history and the characterization of the mean time to repair based on the history of maintenance actions, while also taking into account patterns for component behaviour and condition collected from sensors and utilization rates.
This tool will incorporate an innovative approach to translate the results obtained from the previous tool into a set of harmonised, easily measurable and comparable life indicators for different types of assets, which will allow determining the remaining useful life and the underlying sensitivities against different operation conditions.
This tool will define common approaches to evaluate the assets under different perspectives (operation, maintenance, cost, impact) resulting in asset priority lists. Smart strategies for asset management based on the previous asset evaluation and common life indicators will also be developed. Finally, the outputs of this tool will be embedded in the grid planning and operation tools available in the toolbox to allow optimized decisions taking into account not only CAPEX but also OPEX costs.
Asset Management Module
This tool will support the DSO on the procurement of ancillary services (for voltage control and congestion management) to mitigate renewables uncertainty and ensure that the network capacity is never exceeded during the real-time operation stage. The outputs of the TSO/DSO coordination mechanisms that will run in parallel with the market simulator will define constraints for this tool to avoid that TSOs and DSOs procure conflicting ancillary services in the markets.
This tool optimizes the activation of flexibility, provided by both DSO assets (e.g. stationary storage and OLTC) and procured by the DSO in the ancillary services market, using the day ahead operation planning tool. The goal is to maintain the distribution network operating in a safe mode when forecasting errors occur, while minimizing OPEX and reducing environmental impacts
Even in the future energy systems, where communication technologies are expected to be much more developed and communication-enabled devices prominent, communication failures may still occur, preventing an accurate definition of the network operating state due to missing data. The coverage of distribution networks is a particular challenge due to their scale. This tool will allow estimating the operating state of the network with minimal available information (by estimating the net load in each node of the grid) and thus enable us age all the tools developed for networks operation even when there is lack of data.
