FSR

In this podcast, Jessica Dabrowski (FSR) and Agnes da Costa (Director, Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy) discuss Brazil's long history of renewable energy development. Agnes provides in-depth insight on the current status of Brazil's renewable energy mix, developments in their transport sector and provides key lessons for other countries to best address challenges of the energy transition and unlock their further growth of renewable energy.

The podcast also briefly turns to the Sim, elas existem, or Yes, they exist initiative which has started as a grassroots movement by Agnes and her colleague Renata Beckert Isfer. The initative recently had the spotlight after publishing a list of 163 qualified women and handing it over to the transition team of the new government to give them the chance to appoint women to leadership positions.

*Correction Notice: 6:50 speaker mistakenly states the transport sector is leading instead of lagging behind.

In the context of the Energy Innovation Academy held in Florence on 28-30 November 2018, Tim Schittekatte (FSR) interviews one of the Academy participants, John Smith (University of Hertfordshire) who presented his work on ‘An ecological stock-flow consistent approach to macroeconomic stability, entropy, and chaos’. What do we mean by innovation? How can regulation deal with change in complex adaptive system, in the process of energy transitions?

For more information on the FSR Energy Innovation Area, please visit:

http://fsr.eui.eu/energy-innovation/

In the context of the Energy Innovation Academy held in Florence on 28-30 November 2018, the FSR Director Jean-Michel Glachant interviews Miguel Vazquez, Head of the recently launched Energy Innovation Area. Regulation in times of innovation: how to deal with complexity and uncertainty? The new FSR area provides a platform for research, training and policy discussion to respond to those challenges.

More information here: http://fsr.eui.eu/energy-innovation/

The EU-funded SmartNet project http://fsr.eui.eu/event/smartnet-workshop-series/ organised in Florence (24 to 26 October) aimed to present the recent development of this research project and get feedback from different participants (TSOs/DSOs, regulators and utilities) on topics related to the coordination between TSOs and DSOs for the access to flexibility services.

In this podcast, Athir Nouicer (FSR) interviews David Ziegler from Germany, a participant of the first day of the workshop, to share with you some insights from the project and also how the project could feed the EU regulations; Clean Energy Package and Network Codes.

Different TSO-DSO coordination schemes were compared with reference to three national cases (Italian, Danish, and Spanish) against a set of metrics: mFRR, aFRR cost and ICT cost as well as CO2 emissions and unexpected congestions. This aims to reduce the project complexity and provide a straightforward cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of the different alternatives.

In addition, three physical pilots were implemented to demonstrate the modalities for exchanging monitoring and control signals between TSOs, DSOs and flexibility providers.

The EU-funded SmartNet project is attracting interest from Europe and beyond.

Professor Luis Ochoa (https://bit.ly/2Pj4pRa), from the University of Melbourne (Australia), joined the workshop http://fsr.eui.eu/event/smartnet-workshop-series/ organised in Florence to explore the latest novelties on related topics with a global relevance: the integration of the growing number of distributed energy resources (DER) and the coordination of transmission and distribution electricity systems. In this podcasts with Nicolò Rossetto (FSR), Professor Ochoa reflects on the difficulty of addressing the issue, especially considering the growing expectation to use DER not only to supply flexibility to the transmission system, but also to provide flexibility to the local grid. Market-based integration of DER requires coordination of the market at the local level with the market at the transmission (wholesale) level, taking into account the numerous issues that arise when dealing with low voltages and radial grids. Australia, a country with one of the highest penetration of residential PV in the world, is particularly sensitive to this issue. Aggregators and platforms for DER to access the market are emerging, but for the moment they address only the wholesale market. “Local markets” do not yet exists.

On the sideline of the FSR Policy Advisory Council meeting on the 5th and 6th of November 2018, Christophe Poillion (Vice President of European Affairs, GRT Gaz) and Tara Amirkhizi (Visiting PhD student, FSR) discuss the power to gas technology and the experience the French gas TSO has had with it so far.

In an energy grid that perceives power and gas as a whole, Christophe describes power to gas as a conversion technology that can allow the already established gas grid to offer capacity and flexibility to the full energy system. Besides the grid services, power to gas is also a carbon capturing technology. Using the hydrogen from P2G, CO2 is converted to Syngas and be used in the gas grid.

Pilot projects, such as the French project Jupiter 1000, are an approach for European TSOs to gain the technological expertise for the operation of power to gas facilities. These projects enable this technology to reach a certain maturity level, in order to be competitive. Besides the technology maturity, a well-functioning CO2 market and regulatory frameworks are also crucial in order to make the power to gas technology market ready.

Recently, reliability options were implemented as part of the new Irish integrated single electricity market (I-SEM). Thus becoming the first European Union Member state implement this capacity remuneration mechanism design. Pradyumna Bhagwat (FSR) discusses with Barry Hussey, Manager at the Irish Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), about his thoughts on reliability options in Ireland and the experience with the recently held first auction.

In a ruling from the WTO, published on 10 August 2018, several of Russia’s arguments regarding the alleged incompatibility of the EU’s energy policy measures with multilateral trade rules were dismissed. But was it a total defeat for Russia? In this podcast Moritz Wüstenberg, a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, discusses the ruling and its wider implications.

Following Russia’s withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty in 2009, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules offer the only comprehensive regulatory framework for EU- Russia energy trading, which means that the compatibility of WTO rules with the EU energy policy is vital. The key ambition of the Third Energy Package was to advance the integration of the internal energy market, and thus it contains legislation on unbundling – the separation of energy supply and generation from the operation of transmission networks, non-discriminatory access to energy infrastructures and the independence of national energy regulators. Russia had claimed that the EU was discriminating against Russia in the Package with regard to Russian pipeline transport services, service suppliers, and Russian natural gas. What standing does Russia have following the findings in WTO’s panel report? Should the findings of the report be refuted? Take a listen to our podcast to find out more.

For the WTO report on the case, please follow the link: https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news18_e/476r_e.htm

and for a brief history of the case, from the EC perspective, click on: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/wtodispute/show.cfm?id=644&code=2

Nicolò Rossetto (FSR) and Dr Carlo Stagnaro (Istituto Bruno Leoni, IBL) reflect on the potential benefits of competition in retail electricity markets and briefly discuss the situation in Italy, where a standard regulated offer, called “Maggior Tutela” in Italian, is available to households and small companies. According to Dr Stagnaro, the offer’s design nurtures consumers’ inertia and market concentration, limiting the ability and willingness of energy suppliers to develop innovative solutions and products. A proposal to accelerate the transition to a genuinely competitive and dynamic retail market is presented at the end.

Interested in learning more about the Italian situation and the policy proposal? Read the recently published FSR working paper on the topic:

http://fsr.eui.eu/publications/managing-the-liberalization-of-italys-retail-electricity-market-a-policy-proposal/

In this podcast, Dr. Tanya Harrington delves into the complex geopolitical, economic, and legal issues surrounding Brexit and the Irish electricity market.

For more details, see here: http://fsr.eui.eu/the-irish-question-brexit-and-the-i-sem/