Improving Flexibility Procurement: Options for Product Standardization

The current European landscape of flexibility services is versatile. Services for balancing, congestion management (CM) and intraday (ID) markets differ based on their degree of harmonization, the technical challenge they are meant to solve, the need owner and their specific product characteristics. As the number of flexible technologies and their availability at different network levels are evolving, so do – to an extent – the attributes of flexibility products and the requirements to flexibility service providers (FSPs). Overall, however, country implementation and product requirements remain largely heterogeneous.
To enable interoperability of flexibility use for different services, in the course of the project DigIPlat1, we identify flexibility attributes and analyze ways in which heterogenous flexibility products could potentially be standardized. The standardization of requirements for flexibility products is aimed at enabling a more efficient use of flexibility for multiple use cases, balancing and CM but also the ID market promising an increase in market liquidity and – in the best case – lower overall system costs. The goal of increasing liquidity in the flexibility
market(s) must be balanced against the difficulties of meeting more specific system needs, accounting for technology-specific attributes and implementation efforts.