Local Flexibility Markets for Distribution Network Congestion-Management in Center-Western Europe: Which Design for Which Needs?

Abstract

With the growth of decentralized resources, congestion management at the distribution level has become a growing issue in Europe. Several initiatives with local flexibility markets are being implemented, with different designs and objectives. In this paper, we provide a comparative assessment of four case studies of local flexibility markets (ENERA, GOPACS, UKPN, and ENEDIS) in different center-western Europe countries: Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. We identify a number of differences across these countries that have an impact on the drivers of implementation of these local flexibility markets and their market design such as the type and depth of congestion, the organization and governance of networks operators, the current approach for congestion management, and the need for the development of additional flexibility sources. We find that the different market design choices can be explained by the local specificities and use the four case studies to generalize our findings and define a typology of possible approaches for flexibility markets depending on the electricity system local specificities, as well as the sector governance and the policy priorities.