Explore the 2024 Challenges

We prepared a selection of urgent and concrete real-world challenges that our industry partners from the energy and transportation sector are currently facing.

Partners: BKW, Swissgrid

Contacts: Jan Linder, Jill Huber, Gudrun Hoeskuldsdottir, Malte Rohden

General Description and Problem Formulation

The integration of renewable energy and increasing decentralisation necessitate greater flexibility in the energy system to keep the power transmission and distribution grids stable. Currently, the potential of decentralized and demand-side flexibility is underutilized. The challenge now is to unlock this flexibility and empower consumers to actively participate in shaping a smarter, more resilient energy system.
The problem consists of two parts:

  • Part 1: Understand the different use cases of distributed flexibility (system, distribution and transmission grids, market, self-consumption) and how different technologies can serve the different use cases. Review the current regulation in Switzerland for utilising decentralized flexibility and analyse which policy addresses which use case of flexibility.
  • Part 2: Select and develop 1 – 3 promising “business cases” for (different) owners of decentralized, flexible assets in Switzerland: How can they leverage their flexibility? Who can they partner with? Which purpose can and should they serve? Which policy frameworks support these business cases? Try to quantify possible revenues. The focus should be on use cases which serve DSOs/TSOs.

Research Questions

  1. How does Swiss electricity regulation address the various use cases of decentralized flexibility?
  2. What are the most promising business cases for owners of decentral, flexible assets, and why?
  3. (Bonus) What changes to Swiss regulation could further enable or promote new business cases for distributed flexibility?

Deliverables

Participants are expected to provide both a graphical representation of their findings and a written report highlighting the most important insights.
The selected business cases should be visualized and include marginal costs, necessary market prices and other relevant key variables.

Expertise Required

Participants should be familiar with the technical challenges brought about by the energy transition through variable power production and increasing decentralized loads. They should understand the basics of power markets, including key mechanisms like balancing markets. Beyond this, a keen interest in energy policy, energy economics, and business development will be key to creating innovative solutions.
Since Swiss regulation is not available in English, at least one team member should understand German, French, or Italian.

Solution proposed by the team

Dowload the 2 reports: Download here (PDF, 1.5 MB) and Download here (PDF, 893 KB)

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