Grid congestion arises because the load on the electricity grid is growing faster than the grid can handle. More and more businesses are electrifying their processes, homes are switching to heat pumps, and many solar and wind installations are being added.
The structural solution to grid congestion is to reinforce and expand the electricity grid. This requires permits, personnel, materials, and coordination with other infrastructure, making it a complex and time-consuming process. In the meantime, using existing capacity smartly is essential.
Even once the grid has been reinforced, there will still be times when supply and demand don’t align well—think of a sunny summer day or a cold evening with high electric consumption. Flexible capacity then helps keep the grid in balance.
That’s why grid operators, market participants, and companies are already investing in flexibility solutions—solutions that not only help in the short term, but also make a lasting contribution to a reliable energy system.
Can your production or consumption sites temporarily adjust? Then GOPACS gives you access to a market where flexibility is rewarded. We help you take the first steps, ensure your site is correctly registered, and point you to a suitable service provider. This way, you get more out of your connection and contribute to the grid.
As a CSP, you play a key role in making flexible capacity available. GOPACS supports you through the onboarding process, helps with asset registration and linking, and provides insight into congestion areas and market data. This enables you to serve your customers better and actively contribute to a future-proof energy system.
Flex bids are bids from market parties to temporarily adjust their electricity consumption or production at an agreed price. They form the basis of redispatch: the market mechanism grid operators use to resolve expected congestion on the electricity grid.
When grid operators expect the grid in a certain area to become overloaded, they initiate a redispatch request via GOPACS. A market message specifies where and when flexibility is needed.
Market parties — such as energy suppliers, CSPs, and large energy users — can respond with a flex bid. In this bid, they indicate how much flexibility they can provide and at what price, for example by temporarily producing less electricity, consuming more, or reducing their demand.
GOPACS compares and combines these flex bids and selects the most efficient solution to resolve the congestion, while ensuring that no new bottlenecks arise elsewhere on the grid. If a flex bid is accepted, the party temporarily adjusts its consumption or generation and receives compensation.
In this way, flex bids make redispatch possible: fast, targeted, and market-based congestion management.
Flexible capacity that you offer through GOPACS can often also be used in other energy markets, such as FCR, aFRR, or the imbalance market.
Good coordination is essential:
This helps prevent double use of capacity or conflicting activations.
Becoming flexible does not automatically remove transport restrictions. Grid operators do everything they can to prevent such limitations, but due to the rapidly growing demand for electricity this is not always possible.
What flexibility does help with is temporarily reducing or managing congestion situations. With the help of customers who make flexible capacity available, grid operators can use GOPACS to smooth out peaks on the grid. These situations are often short-lived, such as busy weeks during the winter. This deployment helps prevent the electricity grid from becoming overloaded and improves the reliability of the system. However, it does not automatically create structural additional transport capacity.
In many cases, increasing your connection capacity still requires grid reinforcement or the construction of additional substations.
In short: flexibility helps prevent problems and makes better use of the existing grid, but it does not replace structural grid expansion.
No. Participating in flex bids through redispatch does not directly affect the order in which requests for additional transport capacity are processed. Grid operators use a fixed system for this: applications are handled in the order they are received. Taking part in flex bidding does not change that position.
What flex bids do contribute to is reducing or temporarily resolving congestion. Through GOPACS, market parties help smooth out peaks on the grid. This increases the available capacity on the network and can help relieve congestion areas more quickly.
All grid users ultimately benefit from this. In short: flex bids do not provide individual priority, but they do help make better use of the grid as a whole.
