Swissgrid, together with other partners, works on the extension of CBP to cover one more balancing product – Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR). Several Swiss Balancing Service Providers (BSPs) have declared their strong interest in joining Swissgrid and OEMs in the pilot project, which is planned to run throughout 2020.

FCR is the most standardised balancing product in continental Europe. Its purpose is to stabilise the system after a larger disturbance resulting into an imbalance between the consumption and production. Typically, such a disturbance may be an outage of a large power plant.  The role of FCR for the stability and system security of continental Europe is absolutely essential. Almost half of the continental Europe demand for FCR is being purchased by TSOs in a common FCR market operated by Swissgrid. TSOs from the countries participating in the common FCR market (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland) are continuously pursuing the further development of the harmonized rules for market participants/BSPs. Thus, shall there be an approach simplifying the integration of small units into this market tested in one country, there would be a potential for an easier application throughout this entire market in all covered countries.

Already today there are BSPs providing FCR from pools of smaller units. The implementation of the open-source integration approach brings the possibilities further.

Swissgrid has been developing the new set of FCR-related processes and specifications for the central CBP and the interfaces to the other systems at Swissgrid and for the market participants. The objective of the pilot is to implement the new software features in CBP based on the specifications, test it, and identify the development needs for the future regular operation. In addition, market participants will have a chance to develop commercial cooperation models with OEMs and possibly, technical aggregators.