The main objective of the project was to optimise the use of physical (cross-border) electricity infrastructure with the aim of developing solutions that would increase the possible power flows on the same physical infrastructure (cross-border lines), which included both physical interventions and process changes. For Borzen, as one of the 30 partners of the consortium (led by Ubitech Greece), the project was important as it addressed one of the key elements of the functioning of the EU internal market - optimising the use of cross-border infrastructure.
Borzen participated in the construction of the so-called "Optim-Cap Demo", where the final results of the Optim-Cap demonstration showed, among other things, that:
- the basic co-optimisation function leads to a higher (by 1.5%) social welfare indicator compared to the existing optimisation regime,
- the introduction of a hierarchy allowing the replacement of the rRPF, i.e. the Manual Frequency Recovery Reserve (mFRR), by the aRPF, i.e. the Automatic Frequency Recovery Reserve (aFRR), leads to an even higher SW indicator and achieves the highest SW potential of cross-border transmission capacity,
- the use of cross-border capacity optimisation is showing excellent results, especially in Hungary (many positive effects, with little impact on existing markets),
- the potential balancing costs are significantly reduced in the case of aFRR+, allowing a more cost-effective integration of variable supply and consumption into the network itself and an efficient use of the provision of regional balancing in a heterogeneous way.
Overall, at the overall project level, the main findings are that all Farcross solutions have achieved a positive financial performance rating. However, the highest (extremely high) benefit-cost ratio (11,000) was achieved precisely in the OPTIM-CAP demo, at the expense of an extreme increase in SW.
In addition, all software solutions (e.g. OPTIM-CAP, EUROPAN) achieve an extremely high BCR as a consequence of the low implementation costs and high benefits they offer.