ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE), in collaboration with the Global Power System Transformation (G-PST) Consortium, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) as HAPUA Working Group 5 Secretariat, and Grid System Operator (GSO) of Malaysia as ASEAN Power System Operators Secretariat, had successfully organised a Community of Practice (CoP) for ASEAN Grid System Operators with title “Role of Transmission System Operators for Successful Multilateral Energy Trading Under the Lao PDR – Thailand – Malaysia – Singapore (LTMS) Project”.  The CoP was held virtually on 23 April 2024 and attracted more than 350 participants to join the discussion among system operators. This CoP event was a successor of CoP program for Southeast Asia Grid System Operators which was held in December 2022 on Learning from Vietnam’s Experience on High Fluctuations of Variable Renewable Energy in Grid System. 

Photo 1. Poster for the Global PST Consortium, Southeast Asian Community of Practice.

Through the new series of Community of Practice (CoP), the systems operators from EGAT (Thailand), Electricite du Laos (Lao PDR), and Grid System Operators (GSO) of Malaysia and Energy Market Authority (EMA) of Singapore shared their hands on experiences relating to the coordination and communication framework to facilitate the energy transfer under the LTMS-PIP arrangement. The LTMS power system operators also had ample opportunity to learn from the power system operators in different regions, namely, Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP) and European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), particularly in handling the operation of a rather more advanced power trading model.        

Karin Wadsack, Ph.D., Secretariat Director of G-PST, kicking off the CoP with a brief explanation of G-PST Consortium that focuses on providing support to power system operators and developing advanced engineering and operational solutions to accelerate decarbonisation and enhance energy security in power system. 

Effective Communication and Coordination among TSOs are vital to ensure the smoothness of energy trading. 

The CoP began with technical presentations from Buntoon Nakasiri, System Operator at Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), who presented the experience of LTMS system operator in coordinating and communicating to ensure the successful multilateral energy trading through Communication Mechanisms and Platform, which is jointly operated by EDL (Lao PDR) as an energy supplier, EGAT (Thailand) and TNB (Malaysia) as wheelers of electricity and EMA (Singapore) as a buyer.  

This platform is a web-based system that allows TSO of LTMS to submit real-time information which then plays a crucial role in coordinating energy trading, monitoring power flow, and effectively response to emergency events. In case of emergency events such as HVDC interconnection trip, control failure or any system constraints, the platform provides operation procedures for system recovery and revision process. Besides the platform hosted by EGAT, in case of high emergency TSO of LTMS also communicates through public telephone-international links, private telephone networks (PLC or fiber-optics), and WhatsApp groups. 

The session was followed by knowledge sharing from Europe’s experience in ensuring the smooth operation of more advanced power trading models through increased initiatives for regional coordination. Carla Wolf, a Co-Convener Steering Group Regional Coordination at the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), explained about Regional Coordination in the European Power System.  

The European power system is one of the largest and most interconnected in the world, with increased renewables and system interconnection makes operation increasingly complicated, hence, regional coordination become progressively important in facilitating increased renewable sources, capacity, and security of interconnection between countries. Due to the initiative for increased regional coordination among system operators across the continent, the Regional Coordinator Centres (RCC) were established in 2019. Currently, there are 6 RCCs who are legally mandated to assist TSO in coordinating between TSO (14 inter-TSO coordination tasks) to ensure the cross-border capacity and security of supply. The RCCs also provide TSOs with a regional perspective and perform regional and cross-regional tasks such as capacity calculation, outage coordination, system adequacy forecasting, common grid model, and security analysis.     

TSOs Roles for Congestion Managements in More Advanced Trading Models     

Dr. Oliver John, a Vice Chair of the ENTSO-E Market Committee, continued to explain European experience in handling congestion, especially in more advanced trading models that have at least three different market timeframes (i.e. forward market, day-ahead market, and intraday market). TSO’s main goal is to remove the congestion in real-time by procurement of balancing services further ahead of the real-time to maintain the balance between supply and demand and by activating/redispatching the balancing energy based on the network’s system analysis. Market participants usually also contribute to providing balancing energy.   

In terms of the geographical dimension of the European Power Market, trades are ruled based on cross-bidding zones. The method called “flow-based capacity calculation” is often used by ENTSO-E to calculate the maximum capacity that can be made available for cross-zonal exchanges between each of the bidding zones of the region. The range of possible capacity exchanges is calculated to represent the physical limitations of the cross-border interconnectors. This is how TSO’s role comes to play in managing the congestion in European market coupling. In practice, the TSO of European Power System uses all the data exchanges such as market price, load, generation, transmission, outage, and balancing service through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform to better mitigate the congestion.  

Applicable Solutions for Improving Coordination and Communication Mechanism for TSOs of LTMS   

After hearing European electricity markets set up and how TSO’s roles in ensuring the smoothness of electricity trading in European market coupling, the TSO of LTMS was invited to the panel discussion moderated by Beni Suryadi, Manager of PFS Department at ACE. The panelists are the TSO from all four LTMS countries, Somboun Sangxayarath (EDL of Lao PDR), Buntoon Nakasiri (EGAT of Thailand), Shanmugam Thoppalan (GSO of Malaysia), and Lee Kim Hwee (EMA of Singapore). In addition, Sydney Zimba, Operations Engineer (SAPP), Dr. Oliver John and Carla Wolf (ENTSO-E) are also invited to give some perspectives.  

Photo 2. Beni Suryadi of ACE moderating the panel discussion

The objectives of the panel discussion were to discuss the future improvement of the coordination and communication framework among TSO of LTMS to level up the power trade from unilateral stage (one direction from Lao PDR to Singapore) to multi-lateral (many different directions) by taking the lesson learned from the experience in different regions (i.e, Europe and South African).   

The panel discussion was begun by discussing the existing LTMS coordination and communication mechanism in case of critical period occurs during the power transfer in the four countries involved. Even though in the current practice LTMS rarely occurs any problem, however, in any case of emergency such as trips of interconnection, the coordination will become more complicated as TSO of LTMS will require to do some revisions and confirmation back and forth which may increase the risk of delay in energy trading.  

Meanwhile, the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) is currently the most advanced electricity market in Africa where out of 12 member countries, 9 are interconnected at transmission levels and 20% of electricity trading is through competitive markets. In its initial stage, SAPP resembled the current stage of ASEAN where grids were not designed for electricity transfers in Southern Africa, the interconnection came later as the market progressed, hence, it has room for system constraint and congestion.  

In relieving the congestion in a grid system, SAPP were coming up with transfer limit on each border lines based on the system analysis and building new transmission infrastructures through Regional Transmission Infrastructure Financing Fund (RTIFF) to attract private investment. The RTIFF was raised through the congestion income received when TSO split the markets geographically due to the congestion. The split market will have different clearance prices in order to maximise the congested area.  The money collected from RTIFF scheme then be used as part of the equity to attract private investment to build more transmission lines. SAPP also applied soft measures such as installing Static Var Compensator Voltage Control System (SCVCS) and coordinated outages to mitigate congestion. Furthermore, in terms of communication and coordination, SAPP have installed real time system viewer to monitor power flow in the critical corridors.  

Given the SAPP’s resemblance to ASEAN and its recent achievement, the hands-on experience from Southern Africa could be relevant references and best practices to be followed by the LTMS countries in terms of levelling up the trading mechanism through increasing the coordination and congestion management strategies. A Possible improvement of the LTMS platform is by adding real time power flow into the platform. Such information is required in mitigating the critical period as real time power flow enables TSOs to be better prepared for sudden changes or emergencies, such as trips of interconnection.  

European experiences also advised TSO of LTMS to analyse both system operations and market dynamics when talking about the probability of levelling power trade from unilateral stage (Lao PDR to Singapore) to multi-lateral (many different directions). Developing its processes of ensuring a secure system operation in the region capable to transport energy to the market, which can have a positive impact on social welfare by increasing the share of renewable energy sources.  

The future role of TSO in ASEAN will likely act as coordinating body for energy trading across Southeast Asian countries, facilitating the electricity flow and enabling efficient congestion management to support a reliable electricity grid of ASEAN. The growing number of grid capacity bottlenecks observed today are caused by congestions that occur as a result of forecast complexities associated with the growing share of renewables in today’s energy mix, to anticipate changes in renewable energy withdrawals and their impact on power flow, the ASEAN Grid System Operators should be ready to handle those challenges. By taking experience from the two other regions, adding renewable energy forecasting, real-time unit installed, grid flexibility and congestion management in market integration could be practical solution in the future.