Real-Time Market Concept Architecture for EcoGrid EU—A Prototype for European Smart Grids

Industrialized countries are increasingly committed to move towards a low carbon generating mix by increasing the penetration of renewable generation. Additionally, the development in communication technologies will allow small end-consumers and small-scale distributed energy resources (DER) to participate in electricity markets. Current electricity markets need to be tailored to incorporate these changes regarding how electricity will be generated and consumed in the future. The EcoGrid EU is a large-scale EU-funded project, which establishes the first prototype of the future European intelligent grids. In this project, small-scale DERs and small end-consumers can actively participate in a new real-time electricity market by responding to 5-min real time electricity prices. In this way, the market operator will also obtain additional balancing power to cancel out the production variation introduced by renewable electricity generation. The real-time market concept architecture for EcoGrid EU is introduced in this paper, which provides a market-based platform and information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure that extends the current electricity market to a shorter time horizon and to smaller assets.