EW Flex: A decentralized flexibility marketplace fostering TSO-DSO cooperation

Abstract Can you envision a future grid without customer-owned, distributed energy resources? What about a future grid without any large-scale, fossil-fuel generation? While opinions differ about the speed of the transition, there is near universal acknowledgement that the physical, financial, and political systems used to deliver electricity—collectively, our grid architecture—must evolve to reflect the novel characteristics of a grid where phenomena traditionally bound within the bulk power system—generation, balancing, markets—occur among customers at the distribution level at scale. This fast-moving energy transition has resulted in some peculiar side effects: namely, transmission system operators (TSOs) that are starting to look and act like distribution system operators (DSOs), and vice versa. It is a growing ‘turf war’ of sorts in which TSOs want to reach down into distribution grid assets and customer relationships (conversely, DERs want to reach up into wholesale markets), and where retail market DSOs want to shepherd some of the functions and processes normally reserved for wholesale markets and transmission grids. Yet debates about the appropriate scope for re-envisioned TSOs and DSOs focuses debate on the wrong question. Instead, we should be focused on grid architecture design decisions that put customers (increasingly, prosumers) and their DERs at the center.