2023
Norway
On the pathway to meet decarbonisation targets, Norway is already at 50% electrification and facing a strained grid. To reduce this strain on the grid and avoid deploying more costly infrastructure, the NorFlex marketplace was created to trade flexibility assets. This marketplace pays households and businesses to reduce consumption during peak demand times and sell surplus electricity back onto the grid.
Highlights
01
Creation of a trading platform for assets as small as 1 kWh and as high as 5.4 MWh.
02
Participation of households, electric vehicles, commercial buildings, batteries, and industry in NorFlex.
03
Procurement of a total of 1.394 GWh of flexibility by the DSO Glitre Nett using the NODES flexibility marketplace.
04
Registration of more than 30,000 trades for providing flexibility by 8 different Flexibility Service Providers (FSPs).
05
Payment of almost 1.1 million Euros for flexibility procured by grid operators in three years
Main Information
To respond to grid congestion and allow independent aggregators into the electricity market, the EU has taken steps to allow electricity system operators to produce and deploy flexibility. Moreover, Norwegian DSO Glitre Nett expects a necessary increase of 5x peak capacity due to massive electrification and new connection requests. To avoid resource-intensive grid infrastructure projects, the NorFlex practice was selected to solve these challenges.
The goal of NorFlex is to demonstrate how flexibility can be used by the DSO to increase efficiency of gird operations and grid connection capacity, while postponing costly grid investments. The NorFlex marketplace enables short- and long-term trading within “grid nodes” or zones where the DSO can purchase flexibility, and afterwards the flexibility can be offered to the manual Frequency Restoration Reserve (mFRR) service for the TSO under special rules. Meeting decarbonisation targets requires further electrification, thus the need for solutions like NorFlex to reduce strain on the grid will increase.
other practices
