FORSEL's overall goal is to make the electrification of society faster, more affordably and with acceptable risk.
The ongoing electrification is entirely dependent upon connecting new loads such as infrastructure for charging of electric vehicles to the Norwegian power grid. Building grid to make this happen can be costly and very time consuming. It is therefore crucial to utilize the existing grid as well as possible.
With the amendment of the Norwegian regulation governing grid regulation and the energy market in 2021, Norwegian grid companies now have the opportunity to enter into conditional connection agreements with electricity customers that entail an agreement on disconnection or limitation of consumption if necessary. The new regulation can give cheaper and faster connection for customers who have their own reserves or customers with flexible consumption and therefor can accept lower reliability of supply. This could, for example, be industry within hybrid ships, electric ferries, and hydrogen production.
Conditional connection is considered to be a catalyst for other tools grid companies can get to trigger flexibility resources. On one hand, this will give the opportunity to better risk-based utilization of today’s grid. But at the same time a new challenge occurs for the grid companies and electricity customers; they have to assess the risk of this type of connection to the grid and how they depend on the terms of the agreement.
The Norwegian regulations facilitate a socio-economic rational development of the power system. This requires that the network companies can take risk into account in their decisions, and that they don’t plan the network too conservatively.
New methodology and tools developed in FORSEL will help grid companies to control the risk and make good choices with respect to the future load in their grid. In an overall perspective, this innovation represents a more systematic and rational approach to risk management, both in the planning of connections and in grid expansion.
Among other results, the project will develop a tool for calculating the expected load demand of end-users. This will be useful for grid companies when they are in dialogue with new costumers about what power requirements they need, and in that way avoid oversizing the grid. This “calculator” will, in a new way, combine different types of information that are not currently used in planning of the grid.
FORSEL is an Innovation Project for the Industrial Sector (IPN) and is funded by The Research Council of Norway.
FORSEL is a spin-off project from CINELDI (Centre for intelligent electricity distribution) - a Centre for Environment-friendly Energy Research (FME).
Organisation:
- REN AS is the owner of the project.