Under the coordination of VERBUND, VOESTALPINE, a steel manufacturer, and SIEMENS, a PEM electrolyser manufacturer, propose a 26 month demonstration of the 6MW electrolysis power plant installed at the VOESTALPINE LINZ plant (Austria). After pilot plant commissioning, the electrolyser is prequalified with the support of APG, the transmission operator of Austria, in order to provide grid-balancing services such as primary, secondary or tertiary reserves while utilising the commercial pools of VERBUND. The demonstration is split into five pilot tests and the quasi-commercial operation to show that the PEM electrolyser is able both to use timely power price opportunities (in order to provide affordable hydrogen for current uses of the steel making processes), and to attract extra revenues from grid services which improves the hydrogen price attractiveness from a two-carrier utility like VERBUND. Replicability of the experimental results at larger scales in EU28 for the steel industry (with inputs from TSOs in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) is studied under the coordination of ECN. It involves a technical, economic and environmental assessment of the experimental results using the CertifHY tools. The roll out of each result is provided by ECN, together with policy and regulatory recommendations to accelerate the deployment in the steel and fertilizer industry, with low CO2 hydrogen streams provided also by electrolysing units using renewable electricity. The plausibility of this roadmap is reinforced at the on-start of the demonstration by the creation of an exploitation company involving the core industrial partners, which starts commercial operations of the Linz pilot plant right after the end of the demonstration. Dissemination targeting the European stakeholders of the electricity, steel and fertilizer value chain nourishes the preparation of the practical implementation of the results in the 10 years following the demonstration’s end.

Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia), associated with power system experts, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity providers, propose to design a unique regional cooperation scheme: it aims at opening Balancing and Redispatching markets to new sources of flexibility and supporting such sources to act on such markets competitively. Thanks to a prototype aggregation solution and renewable generation forecasting techniques, flexibility providers – distributed generators (DG) and Commercial and Industrial (C&I) consumers providing demand response (DR) – are enabled, through retailers acting as flexibility aggregators, to provide competitive offers for Frequency Restoration Reserve (including secondary control activated with a response time between 30 seconds and 15 minutes). A comprehensive techno-economic model for the cross-border integration of such services involves a common activation function (CAF) tailored to congested borders and optimized to overcome critical intra-regional barriers. The resulting CAF is implemented into a prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform, securely integrated within the four TSOs’ IT systems: this makes research activities about cross-border integration flexible while linking with the aggregation solution. Use cases of growing complexity are pilot tested, going from the involvement of DR and DG into national balancing markets to cross-border competition between flexibility aggregators. Based on past experience with tertiary reserve, participating C&I consumers and DG are expected to provide close to 40MW of secondary reserve. Impact analyses of the pilot tests together with dissemination activities towards all the stakeholders of the electricity value chain will recommend business models and deployment roadmaps for the most promising use cases, which, in turn, contribute to the practical implementation of the European Balancing Target Model by 2020.