Scope project: an innovative market-based solution to deal with injection congestion

This paper presents the design of a local flexibility market called SCOPE (Secondary Congestion Option Platform Exchange). The aim is to deploy a local market at the distribution network level to avoid congestion and to integrate more renewable energy into the grid by making the most of flexible assets. SCOPE proposes an innovative design in which all energy and financial exchanges are conducted on a peer-to-peer basis between decentralised energy producers and flexibility providers, eliminating the need for the DSO to buy flexibility itself. The ecosystem and the various incentives for players in this market are discussed together with the challenges involved. The main challenges concern the regulatory, algorithmic (bid matching algorithm) and simulation aspects (to measure financial and network reliability impacts). Practical implementation aspects are also discussed based on the demonstrators in the ORES network. These include the choice of pilot zones, fallback solutions, the regulatory sandbox and cybersecurity. Preliminary studies and discussions with the different players of the energy sectors show that the proposed design is of considerable interest to the electrical industry with tremendous potential for accelerating the energy transition.