Product for the European Ancillary Reserves Market

Starting point

The growing share of renewables doesn’t just change the energy market — it changes the need for system services. Reserve power — the short-term provision of capacity to stabilise grid frequency — is increasingly traded across Europe through harmonised markets, for primary, secondary and tertiary reserve alike.

Entering this market, the company set out to extend its product portfolio and expand its European footprint. The result is a stand-alone product focused exclusively on balancing reserve trading — a clear profile next to the existing solution for baseline marketing of generation assets. By the time I left, the product was in production in Denmark, Sweden and Poland.

The challenge

Reserve markets impose requirements that go well beyond pure direct marketing:

• Full product coverage: primary reserve (FCR plus the Nordic variants FCR-N Up/Down, FCR-D Up/Down and FFR), secondary reserve (aFRR, mFRR) and tertiary reserve (RR) — each with its own technical and regulatory requirements.
• Heterogeneous asset base: the system must make wind and solar plants, battery storage (BESS), hybrid configurations and pure consumers market-ready — asset classes with very different response times, power profiles and control logic.
• Country-specific market rules: while FCR is largely harmonised at European level, aFRR, mFRR and RR are nationally shaped. Every market expansion requires adjustments to the respective TSO interface and to national pre-qualification rules.
• Integration with the in-house portfolio: the product has to plug seamlessly into the in-house trading platform ETMP, the in-house SCADA OneView and the in-house park controllers for mixed plant parks — while staying open to external systems.

My responsibility

Building on the proven foundation of the data acquisition platform, I implemented the market and control interfaces of this product and coordinated the cross-product integration:

• Implementation of the interfaces to grid controllers, balance responsible parties (BRP) and transmission system operators (TSO) — including Energinet in Denmark and PSE in Poland.
• Integration with internal systems: interfaces to ETMP, OneView and the in-house park controllers for mixed plant parks.
• Integration with external controllers: integration of third-party park controllers and control systems from various market participants.
• Cross-product coordination: working with the teams behind the other products in the portfolio to ensure a consistent end-to-end solution.
• Market-readiness for all relevant asset classes: wind, solar, BESS, hybrid configurations and consumers — each with the asset-specific requirements for delivering balancing reserve.

Architectural decisions with business impact

Reuse of the proven platform foundation

The product wasn’t built on a greenfield, but on the proven concepts and technologies of the data acquisition platform. That decision shortened time-to-market significantly, secured production-grade stability from day one, and made it possible to focus engineering capacity on the genuinely new requirements — market products, pre-qualification rules and country-specific quirks.

Full product portfolio instead of island coverage

Instead of limiting the solution to individual reserve products, it covers the entire spectrum: FCR including the Nordic variants, aFRR, mFRR and RR. The same technical stack can be configured per market and asset class — rather than building a separate solution for every product.

Asset-agnostic approach

Wind, solar, BESS, hybrid and consumers differ substantially: a BESS reacts in milliseconds, a wind turbine in seconds, a consumer follows its own logic. The architecture abstracts those differences so that, on the market side, balancing reserve delivery stays consistent — without each asset class demanding its own product. That was the precondition for making aggregation and hybrid use cases economically viable.

Connectable inwards and outwards

Integration with the in-house portfolio makes the product immediately usable for existing customers. The parallel open interface to external systems also makes it sellable to customers who already have other components in place. This “both/and” was strategically important because the balancing reserve market is itself very heterogeneous.

Outcome

• In production: at the time I left, live in Denmark, Sweden and Poland.
• Product coverage: full range of balancing reserve products (primary, secondary, tertiary), including Nordic specifics.
• Asset classes: made wind, solar, BESS, hybrid and consumers market-ready.
• Market position: a stand-alone product in the portfolio that visibly expanded the company’s geographic and thematic reach.
• TSO connections: operational interfaces with Energinet (DK) and PSE (PL), among others.

Technologies used

• Platform base: proven architecture and technologies of the in-house data acquisition platform (C++, multi-protocol, cloud-native deployable)
• Reserve products (ENTSO-E and national variants): FCR, FCR-N Up/Down, FCR-D Up/Down, FFR (primary), aFRR, mFRR (secondary), RR (tertiary)
• Market partners and interfaces: transmission system operators (Energinet/DK, PSE/PL and others), balance responsible parties, grid controllers, external park controllers
• Asset types: wind, photovoltaic, battery storage (BESS), hybrid configurations, controllable consumers
• Internal integration: ETMP (trading platform), OneView (SCADA), in-house park controllers for mixed plant parks

Boundary with related projects

While the preceding product was built for baseline marketing of generation assets — with active power curtailment and, later, grid services such as frequency and voltage stabilisation and reactive power control — this product is focused exclusively on balancing reserve trading. Both products share the technical platform foundation, but address different markets and use cases.

What this experience transfers to

This case study stands for a rare profile: deep understanding of the European balancing reserve market across its full product range, combined with the ability to translate that understanding into production software interfaces to TSOs, BRPs and very different asset classes — and to extend an existing product landscape sensibly, rather than duplicating it.