Maximising distributed flexibility with effective TSO-DSO coordination

Key takeaways

• DSOs and TSOs benefit from TSO-DSO coordination due to various reasons. It allows them to optimally manage a shared pool of flexibility sources and protect their grids from potential adverse effects of each other’s control actions. Without coordination, utilising distributed flexibility would become increasingly difficult, leading to a greater reliance on traditional transmission-level reserves—to the extent they would still be available—and increased network reinforcement.
• This coordination should address key requirements, including practicability, scalability, privacy, and efficiency.
• The core components of TSO-DSO coordination—flexibility validation (ensuring activations do not violate network limits) and dispatch (determining which flexibility sources to activate)—can be performed centrally or decentrally. Although a fully central design is straightforward, it underperforms based on all the requirements above. Decentralisation increases complexity and requires substantial distribution management system upgrades. In the meantime, it significantly enhances coordination performance.
• Current coordination schemes lack the scalability required to effectively take the operational limits of large distribution systems into account. To address this, we propose a link chain design framework, a fully scalable approach that allows DSOs and TSOs to systematically and incrementally unlock distributed flexibility.
• The link chain design framework provides a flexible and scalable solution for optimising the coordination of distributed flexibility sources. By dividing the system into standardised, interacting links, it enables parallel processing, ensures privacy by design, and facilitates efficient flexibility management. Its adaptable design allows the link chain setup to be tailored to local conditions and supports incremental implementation, such as beginning with higher system levels and progressively extending to lower levels.

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