About the project

The European 2020 and 2030 targets for renewable energy, greenhouse gas emission and energy efficiency require important changes in the energy system. In particular, there is a growing need for more flexibility to ensure the efficient and reliable operation of the electricity system.

Enhanced synergies between different energy carriers appear now as one of the possible means to provide flexibility to the electricity system but also to drive efficiency and business innovation in the energy sector as a whole.

In this context, the goal of MAGNITUDE is to design and develop business and market mechanisms as well as supporting coordination tools to enable an improved level of flexibility for the European electricity system, by increasing and optimizing synergies among electricity, gas and heat systems. MAGNITUDE aims to:

  • Provide flexibility options to support the cost-effective integration of variable Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and decarbonisation of energy system, and to enhance security of supply
  • Bring under a common framework, technical solutions, market design and business models
  • Contribute to the ongoing policy discussion in the energy field

Objectives and approach

More specifically, MAGNITUDE has four main technical and business-oriented objectives:

OB1 – Enable: Provide tools and models to enable the provision of flexibility for the electricity system from the integration of multi energy systems’ operation.

OB2 – Exploit: Design and develop business and market mechanisms, enabling the full potential value of the flexibility provided. Identify potential regulatory barriers.

OB3 – Validate: Validate the technical flexibility assessments, the tools and models developed and the proposed market and business mechanisms on real life cross country case studies.

OB4 – Maximise the Impact: Optimise external impact, addressing the project results, achievements, lessons learnt and recommendations towards electricity, heating and gas related stakeholder groups.

To make this possible, the MAGNITUDE approach is based on the following set of activities:

  1. Select the most relevant flexibility services towards the electricity system, which allow to increase the share of RES, avoid curtailment of variable RES, enhance security of supply and increase trading between energy sectors.
  2. Study the real flexibility options that the identified technologies and systems can provide to the electricity sector as well as their compatibility with the current regulation and market designs.
  3. Simulate and optimise the control strategy to improve the operations of such technology systems to maximise the flexibility provision
  4. Propose improved market designs for synergies maximisation that will be modelled in a market simulation platform for the project case study countries.
  5. Quantify the benefit of pooling flexibilities from decentralized multi energy systems for energy markets through an aggregation platform
  6. Exploit the achieved results by developing policy strategy and recommendations in a pan-European perspective – including technology, market, business models, and regulation – and related considerations for feasibly increasing synergies between networks in representative EU countries.

The project achievements will be spread among stakeholders to raise awareness and foster higher collaboration among the electricity, heating and gas sectors to achieve the common goal of a less carbon intensive, yet reliable energy system.

The results developed will be validated on 7 real life case studies in Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These case studies form and provide the data foundation for:

  • the model validation and the simulations of the defined scenarios including new operation schemes, services and markets that are being developed as part of the project (OB 3);
  • a reliable impact assessment of the project (OB 4).

The case studies represent a complete spectrum of “cross-sector” technologies found today and entail most representative system configurations in Europe’s heating and cooling sectors, as well as important and representative energy consumption/production facilities among electricity, heating and gas networks. Located in different European countries, they cover different regulatory and geopolitical environments.

MAGNITUDE