Presenting the partners: Nord Pool Consulting

Nord Pool Consulting (NPC) offers services connected to market design, rulebook development and market regulation, power market systems and capacity building, and provide seminars based on its unrivalled knowledge of international power market development.

NPC’s services are inherently linked to the experience the company has acquired through close collaboration with its mother company Nord Pool’s 25 years of successful operation of international power markets, serving as a blueprint model for the European wholesale electricity markets. NPC has detailed insight in all EU market regulations, not only from a theoretical, but also from an implementation and operational perspective, explains Robert Gehrcke, Senior Consultant at Nord Pool Consulting.

In addition to European experience, NPC has been involved in international projects around the world allowing the company to gain experience from other parts of the international power market development stretching from India to Southern Africa.

Role in FLEXGRID

In the EU Horizon 2020 FLEXGRID project, Nord Pool Consulting is in charge of Work Package 2, which is related to developing the project’s use cases and services as well as architecture design.

NPC’s goal as Work Package 2 leader is to exploit FLEXGRID’s novel market design approach to further extend its consulting services portfolio to flexibility market design, development and operation in Europe and beyond, taking into consideration the regulatory framework of each country/region and the diverse needs and opportunities of energy market stakeholders per geographical region, says Gehrcke.

NPC has rich experience in several relevant areas within the FLEXGRID context, including feasibility studies for electricity derivatives markets, electricity market design, implementation support and set-up of wholesale electricity markets, as well as design and implementation of power exchanges.

Pre-study on research models

As part of Work Package 2, NPC will conduct a pre-study on the existing research models and technological background from FLEXGRID partners to identify the way and the degree to which the existing research algorithms, such as optimal power flow, pricing, energy service provider services planning and operation, can facilitate the build-up of the substrates of the FLEXGRID platform, informs Gehrcke.

The output of Work Package 2 directly feeds Work Package 3, 4 and 5 (to navigate FLEXGRID platform design process) and indirectly interacts through them with Work Package 6 (software development and integration) and 7 (pilots, experiments, validation, empirical platform evolution).

In addition, NPC plays a key role in providing data from Nord Pool and balancing markets (i.e., day-ahead, intraday, balance/reserve market prices, etc.) and innovative business models for ancillary services’ provisioning based on the current practice and experience in this area.

Exploitation targets

By the end of the Project, NPC aims to be able to identify new opportunities, especially targeted on consulting services related to business cases for flexibility trading.

After the project’s lifetime, the major exploitation targets of NPC will be to use FLEXGRID’s achievements to identify potential market and product opportunities for its mother company Nord Pool and to educate interested stakeholders who would like to operate a FLEXGRID marketplace in their geographical region, says Gehrcke.