RomeFlex launches flexibility services in Italy’s capital

Roman DSO Areti’s project RomeFlex will test the capital city’s ability to manage congestion and voltage volatility across its stressed power grids.

Approved by the Italian authority Arera in 2023, RomeFlex (Reshaping Operational MEthods to run grid FLEXibility) introduces a new local flexibility market, accessible by all stakeholders connected to the Roman DSO’s medium and low voltage power grids.

Conceived by Areti with the collaboration of GME Engineering and Siemens, it will involve approximately 70 users for a total power of 3,000kW, offering electrical flexibility services throughout the Roman territory. RomaTre University was the first user activated with a 410kW system.

GME Engineering and Siemens contributed to the project, supporting with their energy domain acumen and by making the electricity grid increasingly interactive.

According to the partners, an open and modular architecture allows the RomeFlex project to be scalable and replicable by all the DSOs active in the country, participating with their generation and consumption assets by modulating their loads on the grids managed by Areti.

“The launch of flexibility services in Rome is a fundamental first step in Areti’s strategy”, said Giulio Carone, CEO of Areti, “which envisages developing intelligent electricity networks capable of interacting with the customer, making [them] increasingly active and market participant. This is what we intend to achieve with the RomeFlex Project by involving every type of customer.”

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RomeFlex and Platone

The RomeFlex project, which was initially started in January, 2023, built on lessons learned from a project run by the DSO, known as Platone (PLATform for Operation of distribution NEtworks).

“With RomeFlex, Areti is confirming its pioneering spirit. Since the EU Platone project, we have been jointly developing new technologies and grid software combining IT and OT,” said Alessandro Masi, head of Siemens Grid Software in Italy.

“It will propel Areti towards next level grid management, based on a digital twin, that enables power utilities to successfully deal with growing complexity and increase the much-needed grid capacity, accelerating the path to net zero.”

Successfully completed in August 2023, Platone was a four-year Horizon 2020-funded European project. Platone aimed to define new approaches to increase the observability of renewable energy resources and of less predictable loads while exploiting their flexibility.

A consortium of 12 partners from Belgium, Germany, Greece and Italy developed advanced management platforms to unlock grid flexibility and to realize an open and non-discriminatory market, linking users, aggregators and operators.

The solutions developed in the project were tested in three European demonstration examples.

In the next ten years, it is estimated that the peak electricity demand on the Roman DSO power grid will increase from 2,200MW to 3,300MW.

“With our RomeFlex project, we’re proudly driving innovation in Italy and Europe, using flexibility in order to make the grid smarter, more resilient and future proof,” said Ercole De Luca, head of Innovation at Areti.

“This means exploiting software to forecast congestion and grid issues in time to run sustainable and cost-effective actions, enabling us to keep the grid stable and reactive for all the Roman citizens. Collaboration with Siemens is critical to make this local flexibility project successful, in order to create a blueprint not only for Italy but also in the rest of Europe.”