Research Project: Sustainable Energy Market Integration

The energy market is experiencing a profound transition in the following aspects:

• First, the advance of energy conversion technologies facilitates the interdependency between different energy carriers, which will further enhance the interactions between the energy markets including natural gas, electricity, heating/cooling, transportation, etc.
• Secondly, policy incentive and public awareness on the sustainable energy promote the fast development and deployment of renewable sources across all the energy sectors.
• Thirdly, energy distribution systems play different roles when interfacing the transmission systems. Modern energy distribution systems act as prosumers with bi-directional energy conversion and as the new flexibility resources to support the transmission system operation.

Consequently, there is an urgent need to investigate the potential coordination of multiple energy systems under the market environment. According to the ‘Single Market Progress Report’ delivered by the European Commission, the integration of gas and electricity market in Europe has already delivered many positive results such as the declined electricity prices and enhanced cross-border energy trade. From Denmark’s perspective, the domestic market mechanism for the future energy systems can provide energy consumers with price-competitive energy supply and encourage the consumers to participate actively in the market with demand response.

This project is to investigate the future integrated energy system from the market perspective. 3 working packages (WPs) are included:

• WP1 focuses on the interaction and unification of gas and electricity wholesale market.
• WP2 is to work on the dynamic management of flexible sources for the integrated distribution systems to participate in the short-term market.
• WP3 is to develop business models for the optimal investment on the emerging technologies to enhance the synergies between multiple energy systems.

By these WPs, the major deliverable from this project will be the market models for the Danish energy system transition towards fossil-fuel free.

The project is funded by EUDP (Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program) and has four partners: SDU, Aalborg University, Danish Gas Technology Center and Rambøll.

The total budget of the project is 7.7 mil. DKK, and SDU's share of the budget constitutes 2.1 mil. DKK.

SDU is Project Coordinator, and Magnus Söderberg, mags@sam.sdu.dk is Project Manager.