Siemens and Roman DSO, Areti, have announced their collaboration on the RomeFlex project, which starting today will test the ability to manage congestion and voltage volatility across the stressed power grids of Italy's capital city.

Leveraging Siemens’ digital expertise and software, Areti is managing challenges related to climate change and ‘the electrification of everything’, which are heavily impacting power grids in Italy and all around the world, more effectively.

As a key enabler of the energy transition in Italy, Areti designed an innovative local flexibility market architecture that will be boosted by Siemens pioneering energy domain know-how and dedicated technology.

In the next ten years, it is estimated that the peak electricity demand on the Roman DSO power grid will increase from 2,200 MW to 3,300 MW. To manage this growth in energy demand and prevent the grid from criticalities like blackouts or voltage violations, Areti is going to increase its grid capacity at a fast pace, accelerating its digital transformation to shape the next level of grid management.

"With our RomeFlex project, we're proudly driving innovation in Italy and Europe, using flexibility in order to make the grid smarter, more resilient and future proof. This means exploiting software to forecast congestion and grid issues in time to run sustainable and cost-effective actions, enabling us to keep the grid stable and reactive for all the Roman citizens. Collaboration with Siemens is critical to make this local flexibility project successful, in order to create a blueprint not only for Italy but also in the rest of Europe," said Ercole De Luca, Head of Innovation at Areti.

"With RomeFlex, Areti is confirming its pioneering spirit. Since the EU Platone project, we have been jointly developing new technologies and grid software combining IT and OT. It will propel Areti towards next level grid management, based on a Digital Twin, that enables power utilities to successfully deal with growing complexity and increase the much-needed grid capacity, accelerating the path to net zero," said Alessandro Masi, Head of Siemens Grid Software in Italy.

Siemens Grid Software, a business unit of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, enables grid operators to accelerate and secure the energy transition in a sustainable and profitable way. The software products are part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. They are interoperable, open, flexible and available as a service and provide the highest cybersecurity standards, helping power utilities accelerate their digital transformation – easier, faster and at scale.

Background info

RomeFlex project

Approved by the Italian authority Arera in 2023, RomeFlex (Reshaping Operational MEthods to run grid FLEXibility) is a project that makes real a new and inclusive Local Flexibility Market accessible by all stakeholders connected to the Roman DSO MV and LV power grids.

Thanks to its open and modular architecture, the RomeFlex project is scalable and replicable by all the DSOs active in Italy. All the stakeholders involved can participate with their generation and consumption assets to the new local flexibility market by modulating their loads on MV and LV grids managed by the DSO.

EU Platone project

Successfully completed in August 2023, Platone – PLATform for Operation of distribution NEtworks – was a four-year Horizon 2020 funded European project. Platone aimed at defining new approaches to increase the observability of renewable energy resources and of less predictable loads while exploiting their flexibility. A consortium of 12 partners from Belgium, Germany, Greece and Italy developed advanced management platforms to unlock grid flexibility and to realize an open and non-discriminatory market, linking users, aggregators and operators. The solutions developed in the project were tested in three European demonstration examples.

 

Source: siemens.com

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