European countries are currently and increasingly faced with the challenge of responding to load (i.e. demand) with sufficient electricity generation. The underlying reasons for this are the strong and intermittent presence (or absence) of renewable energy and the increasingly uncertain profitability of conventional generating facilities. If energy is not present – at any given time – in a country, potential help from other countries depends on the overall availability of electrical energy and the grid capacity to transmit it to the country in need of energy.

To ensure a good balance between load and generation, the role of the Short-Term Adequacy (STA) service consists in:

  • Performing regional adequacy assessments to detect situations where a lack of electricity adequacy is expected in any of the control areas or at regional level (pan-European view), considering possible cross-border exchanges and operational security limits. The diagnosis can also include recommendations to optimize cross-border exchanges.
  • Conducting a regional adequacy assessment in the relevant adequacy region, when triggered by the results of STA Cross-Regional assessment or on TSO request (for instance, in case of regional scarcity issue or insufficient cross-zonal capacities). To reduce risk, the RCC will then propose remedial actions to the associated TSOs and coordinate them with the impacted RCCs.

To enable RCCs to achieve such adequacy assessments, each Transmission System Operator (TSO) shall provide the RCCs with the necessary information (expected total load, availability of power generation modules and operational security limits) for its control area. This data is collected in the STA Industrial Tool, also called Pan-European or Cross-Regional tool.

The adequacy reviews are realised for short-term timeframes (based on hourly forecasts for the upcoming week (D-1 until D-7)) but also for seasonal outlooks.

Read more information about this STA service in our annual report or consult the SOGL regulation.

This service is still under development. Therefore, the above explanations may be amended after the full development of this service takes place.