CoFlex — Coordinating Flexibility in Electricity Distribution Grids

Markets, optimization and control for flexible distribution grids

Project overview

Electric vehicles, heat pumps, batteries, and local renewable generation have two effects on distribution grids. When many devices consume or inject electricity at the same time, they can reinforce local peaks and create congestion. But their operation is also partly flexible: charging, heating, storage, and some production can be shifted or adjusted to ease grid constraints.

The outcome depends on how these resources are coordinated. Poorly designed incentives may move congestion to another time or place, or create conflicts with wider electricity markets. CoFlex connects three layers that are often studied separately: the physical behaviour and control of distribution grids, optimization models for market clearing, and economic rules for products, prices, and coordination.

The project examines how detailed network limits can be represented in workable market rules, and whether the resulting market signals can be implemented by grid-connected devices under realistic operating conditions.

Research objectives

The project examines four connected questions:

• How can market models represent local network constraints and the capabilities of grid-connected devices?
• What should flexibility markets trade, across which locations and time periods?
• How do pricing and revenue-sharing rules affect bidding, efficiency, incentives, and the distribution of benefits?
• How should local flexibility markets interact with day-ahead, intraday, and balancing markets, and with coordination between distribution and transmission system operators?

Approach

CoFlex models medium-voltage grids and connected low-voltage networks, including voltage and current limits. The models represent the AC/DC converters that connect solar generation, batteries, and other resources. They cover conventional grid-following and emerging grid-forming controls, with power flows, voltages, currents, and converter responses evolving over time.

Projection, convexification, and decomposition methods translate these physical constraints into tractable market models. Auctions, game theory, and equilibrium simulations compare market rules, bidding behaviour, efficiency, incentives, and technical feasibility.

Real-time simulation and digital-twin case studies test whether the market models remain technically feasible under changing operating conditions and disturbances. Applications include electric-truck charging and battery storage in medium-voltage grids with connected low-voltage networks.

My role

I coordinate CoFlex and contribute to its economic analysis of market rules, regulation, strategic behaviour, and distributional effects. This includes specifying what the market trades, how participants are paid, and how local rules interact with established electricity markets and the project’s grid and optimization models.

Team and partners

The project brings together the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), part of the Louvain Institute of Data Analysis and Modeling in economics and statistics (LIDAM), and the Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering (iMMC) at UCLouvain.

Other principal investigators

• Quentin Lété (CORE) – co-principal investigator.
• Emmanuel De Jaeger (iMMC) – co-principal investigator.

N-SIDE, an optimization-software company, and ORES, a Belgian distribution system operator, contribute operational knowledge and settings in which the models can be tested.

Links

• UCLouvain list of funded ARC projects