Industry Challenge

Europeans are used to constant electricity supply and rarely experience blackouts. TransnetBW’s control room is one of the places where people are working 24/7 to maintain this seemingly inexhaustible flow. The company is one of four transmission system operators in Germany and industry partner of our Challenge 2023. Transmission system operators ensure that the electricity grid is stable. To do this, the same amount of electricity must be fed into the grid as is taken out at any point in time to maintain a frequency of 50 Hertz. To ensure this, TransnetBW uses automated control signals to instruct power plant operators to ramp up or down their infeed. In this challenge we look at the secondary reserve (a primary and a tertiary version also exists) that must be active after a maximum of 5 minutes.

Until recently, every European state used power plants in their own country to maintain the system balance. This has regularly led to the following situations: In Germany, for example, a power plant is ramped up and a few kilometers further across the border another power plant is ramped down. The costs that are incurred by this inefficient use of reserves are ultimately paid by all electricity customers. Since 2022, TransnetBW operates the PICASSO platform that coordinates the deployment of secondary reserve in real time, ensuring an optimal usage of reserves in a European domestic balancing market. This leads to macroeconomic savings of several hundred million euros per year and contributes to the decarbonization of the balancing market.