Assessment of the DSO's flexibility procurement area

The European Green Deal's goal to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050 will directly impact power system development and operation in any sector. Consequently, distribution networks are expected to be decisive in renovating the existing assets to increase the hosting capacity for connecting distributed generation and new loads. In this frame, resorting to the flexibility of generation and consumption can unlock the possibility of postponing or avoiding some of the investments needed to solve temporary violations of technical limits in power distribution. An essential task in the procurement flexibility process is to define the network area where the customers can participate in the flexibility procurement. In some cases, the resources available to provide flexibility are not located in the area affected by the technical violations. Therefore, the contribution to solving the problem is not valid. Based on previous works on the same topic, the paper proposes an assessment of the optimal area of flexibility in the network for the Distributor System Operators, considering the different network configurations that can be adopted, especially during emergency conditions. The application of the proposed methodology to realistic distribution networks demonstrates the validity of the proposed approach.