Denmark joins European balancing community

Denmark has joined the PICASSO pan-European balance platform for balancing the electricity grid.

With this Danish power producers can now offer the automatic aFRR balancing services via the PICASSO platform to TSOs in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands and vice versa.

In the long term, all European TSOs will participate in the platform, the purpose of which is to allow TSOs to share and exploit the cheapest aFRR bids available across the region.

“The green transition is only going one way, and that is more electrification with renewable power from, among other things, solar cells and wind turbines. This gives us challenges in balancing the grid when the wind is still and a drifting cloud passes for the sun,” commented Kia Marie Jerichau, senior director at the Danish TSO Energinet

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“We at Energinet are very pleased that we can now draw on many more balancing services across Europe, while Danish electricity producers can, for example, help our Austrian sister TSO with their balancing.”

Denmark’s entry into the PICASSO platform is the culmination of several years of preparatory work with changes to procedures, systems and IT development.

Energinet has spent the first few weeks starting up slowly to ensure that such a large implementation did not affect the security of supply for Danish electricity consumers and subsequently continually increasing the participation.

At the same time, Energinet is introducing a new market design that fits with PICASSO for the aFRR capacity market in the West Denmark DK1 grid that interconnects to Germany.

Initially, the east Denmark DK2 grid will be connected via the Great Belt cable, but Energinet is working on including the Kontek cable between DK2 and Germany and subsequently the COBRA cable interconnecting Denmark and the Netherlands.

The new setup in the capacity market for balancing makes it possible for renewable energy sources, batteries and electric boilers to bid in.