Electricity market development process
Non-Conventional Power Resources Participating Ancillary Services on Electricity
To achieve net-zero emissions, enhancing the flexibility and resilience of the power grid is the first priority. In 2019, the Taipower Company first introduced the “Non-Conventional Power Resources Participating Ancillary Services on Electricity”. This initiative allows for the provision of ancillary services by reducing loads or activating self-owned generation equipment. It successfully attracted over 84MW of private user resources, with an overall user execution rate in ancillary services stabilizing at around 106%. The services was ended in Dec 31st 2021.
Automatic Frequency Control (AFC) of Energy Storage System
In collaboration with domestic enterprises and ESS manufacturers, TPC has initiated the “Asia’s first” AFC project to procure 15MW of ESS resources providing frequency regulation services in July 2020. These ESS resources can automatically follow the frequency variation and can adjust its output/input within 1 second. The functionality of AFC on ESS resources has proved its value to prevent from the grid contingency during the blackout incident in 2021.
Establishment of Energy Trading Center
Based on the success of the aforementioned plan, Taiwan government legislated regulations for energy trading and mandated Taipower Company to establish “Energy Trading Center” for ancillary service market and reserve capacity market. Currently, through the establishment of a qualified trading system by Taipower Company, in addition to the state-owned power generation industry, dozens of private companies have officially participated. Also, nearly thousands of individuals have passed the professional qualification examination for energy trading. Presently, 23 industries, including electronics, department stores and electric vehicle manufacturing, have contributed to stable power supply through the platform. Until February 2024, the registered capacity applications have reached over 1,181.7 MW or more.
Power Market Refinement from 2023 to 2024
New Specifications
In July 2022, the energy trading platform introduced the E-dReg, allowing for the combined utilization of frequency regulation and energy transfer under the Regulation Reserve product. By February 2023, first 6MW resource have been integrated online, assisting Taiwan’s power system to smooth and shift net load changes caused by renewable energy. Additionally, a goal was set to install 1,000MW of energy storage by 2025, including 500MW of dReg and 500MW of E-dReg.
Marketing rules revision
After two years of market operation, Taipower Company revised the market rules for the energy trading platform on October 1, 2023, with the following key adjustments:
- New product: E-dReg was renamed as the Energy-shifting with Dynamic Regulating Function Reserve, and it was separated from regulation reserve to become an independent trading product, strengthening its utilization in energy transfer. With this change, the energy trading platform now offers four trading products, as illustrated in Figure 1.
E-dReg during the period when there is no energy transfer schedule or no dispatch instruction, trading resource should maintain the operation function of automatic frequency control according to dynamic regulation technical specifications. When executing energy transfer schedule or dispatch instructions, trading resources should not only execute dynamic regulation capacity but also simultaneously execute the scheduled or instructed energy transfer amount.
- New product: E-dReg was renamed as the Energy-shifting with Dynamic Regulating Function Reserve, and it was separated from regulation reserve to become an independent trading product, strengthening its utilization in energy transfer. With this change, the energy trading platform now offers four trading products, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Ancillary service products
- Revision of performance index calculation method: The calculation method is adjusted to review the performance index for the first three seconds every second and take the maximum value of these four seconds, then take the minimum value of the performance index per second for 3600 seconds in that hour. This is done to improve the identification of resource service indicators.
- System Optimization
In order to reduce the burden of qualified traders in maintaining the system and troubleshooting, and improve management efficiency and service quality, an SD-WAN platform was implemented in February 2023 for centralized management and maintenance. This network, featuring a star topology, improve transmission security and improve information security protection by preventing unauthorized IP access and prohibiting communication between qualified traders.
Received the Highest Honor from National Development Council
Taipower Company stood out among 145 agencies and won the 6th “Government Service Award-Digital Innovation Value-Added Award” of the National Development Council for the first time in 2023 for its energy trading platform. The energy trading platform uses digital information technology integration and an economic sharing energy trading business model to successfully attract private flexible power resources from 23 types of industries, including the electronics industry, department store industry, and electric vehicle industry, to join the dispatching ranks.
Looking forward to the development of Taiwan’s energy trading in 2025, it is expected that more than 3,900MW of different types of power resources will be obtained through various emerging energy trading systems. These power resources with real-time dispatch and the energy trading technology capabilities established by Taipower will make Taiwan’s power grid one of the most sustainable and resilient power systems in the world, and will make Taiwan more confident on the road to achieving net-zero emissions.
