Identification of common services in European Flexibility Demonstrators for Laboratory-based Interoperability Validation

Interoperability is a key feature of digitalized energy systems. Significant high shares of volatile renewables require the wide use of system flexibilities from controllable generation and dedicated storage to load management. In an electricity system with separate roles for grid operation and energy retail, the activation of flexibilities can be realized in many different ways. However, from an European perspective, the provision of flexibility should require the same technical interfaces disregarding the region or utility. In this work, the different services required in flexibility use cases of the European demonstration project, InterFlex, are analyzed and a methodology is presented that allows identifying the relevant test cases for functional interoperability between the different components, namely the flexibility itself, the flexibility requester and potential intermediates such as aggregators. One of the major outcomes of the analysis of six Inter Flex pilots is the identification of several common patterns. These common patterns when classified further based on the suitability for a laboratory validation, resulted in three super categories namely congestion management, voltage, and frequency support. Among the major conclusions is that these three are the core requirements for forming an electrical flexibility usage in any European power system context disregarding the region or utility. A brief discussion for possible validation architectures is also provided.