Stromausgleich Österreich – The Austrian flexibility platform

To meet Austria’s Mission 2030 target of covering 100% of total electricity consumption (national energy balance) from renewables, it will be critical to integrate and coordinate decentralised flexibility potentials in order to integrate the rising share of renewable energy sources in the electricity market. This calls for an innovative solution that will give all market actors access to flexibility while accounting for power grid restrictions at all grid levels.

APG is responsible for ensuring that production and consumption are balanced in the Austrian power grid at all times. Since 2012, APG has been carrying out these tasks entirely market-based.

Up until now, smaller power generating and consumption units did not typically have a direct link to the wholesale electricity markets. A newly developed flexibility platform will facilitate these decentralised units to access the markets in light of the increasing trend toward decentral, renewable electricity generation and smart demand-side facilities. This will open up new possibilities for flexibility services to meet future challenges in the power grid.

For the implementation, APG joined the European consortium Equigy as one of the founding members. In this context, Equigy’s software solution, the crowd balancing platform (CBP), was developed further and implemented as a national instance in Austria. The CBP will facilitate market parties‘ participation in the balancing and ancillary services markets, and enable them to connect small-scale flexibility assets such as photovoltaic systems, batteries, heat pumps, electric cars, etc.