Currently in Spain aggregated flexibility is not tackled in the national legislation. But good news! The TSO has recently published a roadmap going into the right direction.
The consequences of EU regulation
Red Eléctrica de España (REE, the Spanish TSO) has already elaborated a draft roadmap for the implementation of the Electricity Balancing Directive (EU regulation 2017/2195). In this drafted roadmap, REE describes four markets to be opened: automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR, MARI platform), manual Frequency Restoration Reserve (mFRR, PICASSO platform), secondary regulation of Imbalances compensation between systems (IGCC platform), and substitution reserves (TERRE platform).
Pilot foreseen in 2019 and 2020
In this drafted roadmap REE has specified that aggregated demand response and storage is going to be tested during the last trimester of 2019, and around mid-2020 will be open to participation.
Moreover, the document is also declaring some interesting news for aggregators:
- The minimum bid to participate into the balancing services will be 1MW (instead of the current 10MW).
- The imbalance settlement period will switch from 1 hour to 15 minutes in 2021, 2023 or 2025 according to three different scenarios.
Although this is a draft roadmap, is exciting news for the Spanish Market, where aggregated flexibility from domestic users will be valuable and unleashed in the short term.