The 2023 edition of the Smart Energy Summit will take place in Brussels on 19 April. This biennial event is organized by SmartEn, the European business association on solutions for clean energy transition, and gathers more than 200 senior professionals from market players, system operators, financial institutions, and public authorities.
This edition will have a special emphasis on distributed flexibility, and in particular on the importance of maximizing the local self-optimization of distributed flexible energy resources (discover more here). The one-day summit will include keynote interventions and panel debates from high-level speakers, interactive break out group discussions among attendees and opportunities for networking.
Enel X will participate with its Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs Paul Troughton, who will join a panel on the monetization of flexible markets.
Distributed flexibility and local self-optimization
With the growth of electrification, of renewable capacity and of distributed energy resources, the flexibility of the electricity market at the local level is becoming an essential tool to allow operators to adjust to the intermittent and unpredictable supply of energy. The increase in electrification of end-use sectors risks leading to massive local congestions and over-investments in distribution grid capacity if the use of distributed energy resources is not optimized through multiple initiatives that aim to give local districts the capacity to self-balance.
Thanks to a multitude of business models that allow to balance energy supply and demand in real time, self-optimization of local districts would help solve congestion challenges and avoid costly grid reinforcements, and this development would benefit both consumers and the whole energy system.
But key elements for local flexibility, such as collective self-consumption, citizens energy communities or cooperatives, renewable energy communities, are developed in a very heterogeneous ways across Europe, which is limiting their uptake. Most of them are still in their infancy or restricted to pilot projects.
If distributed energy resources are to play a significant role in the future, innovative and additional market arrangements must be designed around new models of local use of available distributed resources.
The Smart Energy Summit will analyze this topic through several dimensions affecting local energy optimisation, in particular:
- Financing – Access to finance options for businesses and consumers is crucial to set up and deploy cost-effective local self-optimization schemes.
- Innovation in Local Optimization – A multitude of energy trading and sharing schemes are in development, beyond local energy communities.
- Flexible Markets Monetization – Local optimization can provide benefits to the whole system, and flexibility can be traded across districts thanks to several market mechanisms.
Enel X and Flexible Markets Monetization
Paul Troughton, Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs of Enel X, will participate in the panel on “Flexible Markets Monetisation”, which is the third part of the morning session on “Financing, Innovation and Flexibility Markets Monetisation: the 3 features of local optimisation business models”.
The panel will take place from 13.30 to 14.45. The other panelists will include Lucinda Murley, Flexibility Research Service manager at LCP Delta; Nick Hubbers, CPO & Co-Founder at Jedlix; Johanna Izett, Senior Account Executive at Hive Power; Juan Perez, Director of Strategy at Epexspot; Geir Magna Abusdal, System Manager at Glitre Nett; Moritz Lauster, Senior Product Manager Flexibility Management at Viessmann. The discussion will be moderated by Sebastian Kotyla, Membership & Partnership Officer at SmartEn.
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