Advanced metering infrastructure interface enabling flexibility market

Smart grid is used as a platform when moving towards a more distributed and carbon-neutral electricity system. The growing amount of renewable, weather-dependent energy production increases the need for managing peak powers and sudden system changes. To unlock the demand response potential, smart grids and home automation systems should advance small-scale customers’ participation in retail markets. In Finland, there are approximately 1800 megawatts of meter-connected controllable loads, making it profitable to aggregate them for demand response purposes.

A Finnish DSO Elenia Ltd. (Elenia) is implementing and testing an interface through which the market parties could control the smart-meter-connected loads of small-scale customers. The solution is new in Finland and the goal is to prove the technical feasibility of using advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) as a base for market-based control actions. To prove that, Elenia is enabling test control actions in a pilot project. In the future, market parties could aggregate the loads of small-scale customers via the interface to participate in the flexibility markets.

In the pilot project, new smart meters enabling load control actions have been installed for 76 Elenia’s small-scale customers. The smart-meter-connected loads are boiler and/or electric heating. The loads are controlled through the interface by Elenia’s partner organisations from June to December in 2019. The selected loads were already controlled. In the Finnish market, for tariff purposes, these meters implement a schedule for the load control relay to allow loads to be on during night.

The control methods varied during the pilot period. In the beginning a narrower customer group and a short control time with single control action were used. Later, the whole pilot group’s loads were controlled with more complex methods. The information delivered via the interface to the meters consists of the state of the relay (ON/OFF) and the power data before and after the control action. Elenia’s software receives the information of the premises to be controlled, the control times and the wanted relay state from the partner organisations. Elenia’s software also measures the transaction time and sends timeout messages for the responsible organisation if the power information is not received from the meter in a certain time frame.

In the pilot project it is proved that the loads can be controlled by a third party through DSO’s interface using AMI. The potential of controllable load in Elenia’s grid, the customers’ opinions and the living comfort impact are also researched.