The European Union is aware of the need for attaining higher energy targets. To this end, it introduces financial incentives for various development and innovation projects through co-financing mechanisms. One of these was also the project, Farcross – FAcilitating Regional CROSS-border Electricity Transmission through Innovation, in which the HSE team actively participated in the last 48 months and received a financial incentive for its efforts. Furthermore, it obtained rich experience and valuable knowledge.
The fundamental purpose of the project was the optimisation of the use of physical (cross-border) electricity infrastructure in order to develop solutions that would increase possible power flows on the same physical infrastructure (cross-border lines), which involved physical interventions and amended procedures.
More than 30 European partners from various fields linked with the operations of the common European electricity system were involved in the project. As the largest electricity producer in Slovenia, HSE is directly linked with the Slovenian transmission network, while as an international stakeholder on the European electricity market, HSE participated in the project together with Uniper, the Hungarian electricity producer, in the development of the Optim-CAP demonstration model through which an analysis of various scenarios of cross-border electricity trade and systemic services with the use of the common trading platform was implemented. The four-member HSE team – Jernej Brglez, Jernej Otič, Andrej Knuplež, Boris Moličnik – successfully proved through the Optim-CAP model that the basic co-optimisation function leads to a higher social welfare indicator (by 1.5 per cent) if compared to the existing optimisation regime. They further proved that the introduction of hierarchy that permits replacement of mFRR (manual Frequency Restoration Reserve) with aFRR (automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve) leads to an even higher SW indicator and attains the highest SW potential of cross-border transmission capacities. The Optim-CAP model revealed that the application of optimisation in cross-border capacities delivers excellent results and that the potential balancing costs are reduced significantly in the case of aFRR+, which enables better cost integration of variable supply and consumption in the network and efficient utilisation of regional equalisation in a heterogeneous manner.
Read more about the project at https://farcross.eu/
Promotional video of the FARCROSS project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_jOvhg4TUU
