DSOs and cities need to team up to limit pressure on urban grids – E.DSO

DSO-city collaboration is needed to ensure that grid status and needs are integrated into urban planning and decision-making, E.DSO reports in a new innovation brief.

With the shift from centralised to decentralised energy production, stresses on local distribution grids are growing, particularly in the more densely populated urban areas, and they could increase with the majority of new distributed resources needing to be connected to the distribution networks.

With more than three-quarters of the EU population living in cities and to avoid disruption of city activities, Europe’s DSO organisation E.DSO is calling for cooperation between DSOs and local authorities to ensure that the status and needs of the grid are integrated into urban planning and decision-making.

To achieve this, ‘local energy action plans’ (LEAPs) jointly developed by the DSO and the municipal authorities are proposed as a powerful tool for seamless DSO-city collaboration and to overcome challenges such as the multitude of stakeholders that need to be involved and the complexity of understanding technical grid issues for external stakeholders.

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In particular, LEAPs should combine urban planning with energy network planning to ensure that planned actions consider the capabilities of the grid, E.DSO states.

The goal is to provide a unique strategy for the DSO and city to optimise existing grid infrastructure, avoiding congestion issues and costly investments while improving services and living conditions in the city.

For this, LEAPs should gather and present evidence-based information on the current state of urban infrastructure and development trends. The inclusion of information on the current conditions of the energy system, such as generation sources, distribution network capacity, demand patterns, etc., then highlights the key aspects that need to be addressed to meet the long-term strategic ambitions for the area.

E.DSO adds that the scale of a LEAP should be jointly defined by the local authority and the DSO, considering different pathways, e.g. EV charging pathways for a mobility LEAP in a specific neighbourhood, or priority sectors.

EU-wide replication with COPPER

E.DSO points in the innovation brief to the LEAP framework that is developed by the Interreg North Sea-funded Cities for Open and Participative Planning for Electricity Grid Resilience (COPPER) initiative as being designed to remain consistent across different contexts so it can be replicated across the EU.

The COPPER initiative, which began in October 2023 and in which E.DSO is a partner, will test new technologies, business models and planning methods for DSOs and local authorities to work together to drive locally powered cities.

The city of Ghent is leading the project and as one of the six LEAP pilots, is collaborating with the Belgian DSO Fluvius to develop an all-electric neighbourhood within the city.

In another of the pilots, the city of Dordrecht, Netherlands, and Dutch DSO Stedin are collaborating with the ambition to develop Europe’s first energy-neutral business park.

Other pilots are taking place in the cities of Bremen in Germany and Antwerp in Belgium around e-mobility and the municipality of Fredericia in Denmark is testing the creation of a virtual energy community to support the growing need for flexibility.

Varberg Energi, the municipal-owned DSO for the Swedish town of Varberg, is also building a city-wide virtual power plant within COPPER.

The COPPER project runs for four years to 2027 with deliverables including data models and a digital toolkit to boost local authoritys’ capacity to understand and steer their local energy systems.