Impacts of electricity market liberalization on centralized generation and telecontrol infrastructure

In Europe, before the EC directive on the liberalization of the electricity market, most of the power systems were "vertically integrated", i.e. the generation, transmission and distribution chain belonged to the same public utilities. The telecontrol and dispatching infrastructure was designed in a holistic way that is optimized in terms of global costs. Since the EC directive on the liberalization of the electricity market in 1996, the process of unbundling the European electric utilities is still on its way with different levels of implementation in terms of infrastructure redeployment and market mechanism to facilitate energy trading and to secure supplies and power grids. Infrastructure redeployment and impacts of open power markets on centralized power generation, supervision and telecontrol infrastructure are analyzed and illustrated through examples in France and in Germany. In such an energy landscape, Information Technology (IT) becomes a key factor for the development of the market as well as for the participants. In this new energy environment, Distributed Energy Resources (DER) can offer complementary supplies to centralized power generation, but its development requires infrastructure investments in terms of telecontrol and distributed energy management systems.