All about Control Reserve

Thu., August 13 2020, 3 p.m. (UTC+2)

Balancing Services are reactive short-term means to level out frequency deviations in the power grid. Balancing Services (sometimes also called control reserve) is one out of many ancillary services that system operators have to provide a secure power supply.

mFRR is the manual Frequency Restoration Reserve that helps to stabilize the frequency of the electricity grid. In most countries the TSO (Transmission System Operator) is responsible for its procurement and activation. The mFRR (also R3 or tertiary reserve) helps to restore the required grid frequency of 50 Hz (or in some countries of 60 Hz). This tertiary control reserve intervenes when there are longer lasting deviations in the power grid that cannot be resolved solely by the other upstream balancing services (FCR or aFRR). 

mFRR must be, according to the guidelines proposed by the European Network of Transmission System Operators of TSO in Europe (ENTSO-E), fully deployable after 12.5 minutes and has a minimum duration period of 5 minutes. Different auctions determine which Balancing Service Provider (BSP) holds back capacities and/or delivers the reserve in case of imbalances for each quarter hour.

When Next Kraftwerke expanded its operations to Belgium in 2014, one of its goals was to convince the transmission grid operator Elia to open its automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR) market for all technologies. aFRR, also known as secondary reserve, has historically been provided by a handful of gas fired power plants operated by two or three companies.

After two years of development, in August 2020, Next Kraftwerke and Jedlix started offering secondary reserve power (aFRR) to the Dutch grid using a pool of electric vehicles (EVs). Nick Hubbers, Jedlix, and Elias De Keyser, Next Kraftwerke, talk about their ambitions, how they realized this project, and what they learned along the way on using electric vehicles to balance the grid. Fasten your seat belts and keep reading!

On June 22 of 2020, Poland came very close to a countrywide power outage: Power plants with a capacity of thirteen gigawatts (out of which, only six planned) went down – and subsequently, balancing energy prices rose to record level.

The Electricity Balancing Guideline (EBGL) was created by the European Commission to establish and regulate the smooth exchange of balancing energy across the internal borders of the European Union. This guideline, which came into force as Regulation 2017/2195, sets the framework for the stabilization of the electricity grid throughout the European electricity market system. The aim is a pan-European market for system services with a harmonized market design and non-discriminatory trading of balancing energy without barriers between markets. As a result, TSOs will be able to procure balancing power more efficiently, more reliably, and cheaper.

Balancing Services are reactive short-term means to level out frequency deviations in the power grid. Balancing Services (sometimes also called control reserve) is one out of many ancillary services that system operators have to provide a secure power supply. Balancing Services include Balancing Energy and Balancing Capacity . Balancing Energy means the energy which is used by system operators to perform the maintenance of the frequency and Balancing Capacity refers to a flexible capacity which the provider has agreed to keep available for a certain period in order to provide balancing energy. [1]

The COVID-19 pandemic shakes up the world – but the power grid in Europe remains stable. What ensures this stability and how do the electricity markets in Germany and Europe react to the situation?

Jan de Decker, Paul Kreutzkamp and Elias de Keyser from Next Kraftwerke Belgium explain in this blog what lessons can be learnt from the roughly nine months of the mixed price system on the reserve power market in Germany.

How the mixed-pricing system turns the security of the electricity grid into a speculative mass: On the sixth, 12th and 25th of June 2019, market distortions occurred in Germany; some of which had severe effects on the electricity grid.