Equigy is working on One Common Front Door to make it easier for new aggregators to enter the electricity market in their country and in Europe. Martin van ’t Verlaat, Chief Technology Officer at Equigy, explains what it is and why Europe needs it.

Why is Equigy working on One Common Front Door?

In the markets we see that smaller distributed assets are being unlocked by aggregators who are mostly new entrants into the electricity market. These companies are new to the game and not connected to the TSOs technology and interfaces in the traditional way. These interfaces can be cumbersome and complex to set up, since they use for instance protocols from the SCADA area. And often there are different connections to different TSO systems for primary, secondary and tertiary reserves. Equigy provides to aggregators an easy way to access these interfaces. This is even more important as these aggregators are largely smaller companies that don’t have large IT teams where they can specialize to develop solutions to connect with TSO’s themselves.
Secondly, we also see a need for standardisation across products and markets. Aggregators often have an international orientation. They aggregate third-party resources that have been built by an independent manufacturer. This enables them to easily follow the manufacturer to every market in which the product is sold. However, this mobility is restricted if they do not have easy access to a market and need to make investments in technology in order to get started.
One Common Front Door offers easy access in a standardized way so that, from a technical perspective, aggregators can copy-paste activities in one market to another. In this way, they have easy access to multiple electrical products in multiple markets in Europe. They do, of course, still need to pre-qualify to operate in a market.

How does this help the aggregators?

Equigy makes the process to connect to TSO markets easier, cheaper and faster. It can currently be a hassle for aggregators to participate in TSO markets, because it’s quite complex and therefore costly and time-consuming to access one market, let alone multiple markets in multiple countries. So the common front door offers a solution by standardizing the access to these markets.

Why is the time ripe for a common approach?

Standardisation has been a hot topic for over twenty years. Many working groups and projects have been set up to address it. The greatest obstacle is that markets differ widely and creating easy access is highly complex and requires a significant investment. That is precisely the reason why only TSO’s can do it: there is no commercial business case for offering a facility for standardization.
Standardisation and easy access are aligned to TSOs’ mission to facilitate markets and offer a positive business case from a societal point of view. Creating easier access also creates more liquidity in the markets, which leads to more capacity – something that TSOs welcome as the role of renewables grows. And more capacity and more parties offering it, leads to the right prices; this is another factor in the societal business case.

What does One Common Front Door entail?

Simply put, it’s a kind of Google Translate for the electricity market. We do not address the diversity or complexity of the technology on the TSO-side but build a translation layer around all the TSO markets that work together in Equigy. This offers market parties a relatively simple and straight forward interface with TSOs, based on technology that everyone understands. What goes on under the hood, remains the same.

What is the status of this approach?

We’re working on a definition of a common platform. To do this, we’re looking at each and every country in our consortium to get a very good understanding of all balancing and redispatch markets. Our aim is to identify both commonalities and gaps between the markets. The commonalities can be addressed with common solutions, which creates synergy in investments.
Our strategy is to have 15 to 20 TSO markets and DSO markets connected to the common platform, rolling it out step by step. We’ve been live in the Netherlands for a few years now. After a slow start, we now see rapid onboarding of new market parties that are connecting to TenneT’s aFRR. This shows that the concept works and that it fulfils a need. Next up is Austria – we are on the verge of launching there.

What are the greatest challenges for a pan-European platform?

From a technology perspective, creating standardisation is the hardest part. You need to take differences between TSOs in account but at the same time, make access as easy as possible for market parties, too.
Meanwhile, it’s also important to ensure that all TSOs continue to be aligned as creating the common platform requires a huge effort from all involved – not just from Equigy but from the TSOs as well.

Will consumers also benefit from the European common front door?

Indirectly, Yes. The common front door is intended to develop the market by reducing barriers for aggregators, not for consumers, but with more aggregators participating there will obviously be opportunities for consumers as well. That means that for the first time in history consumer assets have the potential to help manage the grid and earn some money in the process. Right now, their earnings are often limited to optimizing consumption with for instance dynamic electricity contracts and apps for smart charging. In the future, aggregators need to be able to respond to signals from TSOs almost in real time to counterbalance a surplus or shortage on the grid, in order to unlock this value for their customers.

Where can parties find more information about the European Common Front Door and taking part?

Aggregators can contact their TSO or Equigy. We are more than happy to discuss the possibilities with them and share information on what they can expect. Consumers cannot take part directly – they need to find an aggregator who offers this service.