Analysis of Market-Based Flexibility Services- An Evaluation of Flexible Resources’ Indirect Impact on Network Congestion.

Abstract: Capacity shortages in electricity grids can impose significant costs on society due to missed investments in industry. Due to limited profit opportunities and long lead times, grid reinforcements are not a viable solution to the problem, which must therefore be prevented through efficient use of existing grid resources. Local flexibility markets can financially compensate electricity users to shift their electricity consumption to less demanding hours of the day, thus providing a solution to the problem. At least temporarily. If the electricity consumption of several users is shifted to the same time, the combined impact can lead to even bigger problems than those they were intended to solve. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the utility and impacts of different flexibility resources on grid component loading after they have been procured on a flexibility market. Furthermore this thesis aims to suggest how the market can be adapted to the resources in order to enable an efficient use of the grid. By identifying and modelling relevant flexibility resources and their characteristics, power flows can be simulated in a modelled regional distribution network. The resources investigated in this paper are: electric vehicles, heat pumps, industrial loads, and batteries, where characteristics such as duration, recovery time, and availability have distinguished them. The results obtained show that endurance and recovery time are crucial characteristics for how well a resource can affect the load in the electricity grid. In addition, they suggest that the procurement of flexibility services by one grid owner can negatively affect the operation of another grid. Other than that, the reliability of the quantitative results was considered insufficient to draw conclusions about the utility of the different resources in the grid. A proposal to introduce a requirement for flexibility providers to specify their recovery time was put forward in this report but was proposed to be implemented at a later stage of the establishment of flexibility markets.