Engineering of Ancillary Services System as a Part of Swiss Energy Market Introduction

Presentations

Engineering of Ancillary Services System for the Swiss Energy Market

Summary

by D.Tchoubraev Swissgrid AG

Electric energy market in Switzerland, started through issue of the "Electric Current Law" (Stromgesetz), became operational at 1.1.2009. Among the most important market introduction activities were introduction of balance groups, realisation of possibility of energy provider change and the introduction of the ancillary services market.

Ancillary services include primary, secondary and tertiary frequency regulation, voltage control and losses compensation in transmission network. Those services were provided by the Swiss electric utilities till the end of 2008, and according to the law, came under responsibility of the Swiss Transmission System Operator (TSO) Swissgrid.

The re-orientation of the ancillary services towards market forced the complete re-design of the business processes and responsibilities, resulting in the significant technical and organisational changes that caused multiple challenges during the implementation.

To solve those problems, the development and operationalization of the new market management platform, containing auctioning, clearing, activation, monitoring, controlling, accounting and billing components, was started. This complex IT system had to support all the (not yet existing at the time point) market processes for the ancillary services, and had to be specified, developed and taken into operation with an extremely tuff scheduler – October 2007 till the end of December 2008 – to become productive simultaneously with multiple other Swissgrid and external systems in the night to the 1^st of January 2009. This unique task forced on-the-fly developed and introduction of the special system engineering approaches that will be addressed in the presentation.