Clean flexibility solutions can significantly reduce Europe's reliance on gas in the power system, delivering affordable, reliable, and secure electricity. Flexibility refers to the ability to balance the power system to ensure supply matches demand, while clean flexibility is provided by clean technologies or approaches.
Key Benefits of Clean Flexibility:
- Energy Security: Reduces dependence on gas imports, insulating Europe from LNG market volatility. Gas contributed to a tenfold increase in electricity prices during the 2021–2022 energy crisis.
- Reduced Renewables Curtailment: Avoids curtailment of low-cost renewable generation. Without clean flexibility, 50–131 TWh of renewable electricity could be curtailed annually by 2030.
- Lower Energy Bills: Clean flexibility has already reduced customers' electricity bills, with £300 million saved in Great Britain in 2024. By 2030, demand-side flexibility could save Europeans €300 billion per year.
- Direct Benefits for Flexible Households: Customers participating in demand-side flexibility could earn up to €86 million per year, or €600 per household.
- Resilient Energy Communities: Enables autonomous and energy-independent communities to run fully on renewable energy, with households saving 15%–60% on annual energy bills.
Clean Flexibility Today:
- Great Britain was fully powered by clean electricity for 87 hours in 2025.
- Portugal achieved 6 days without fossil fuel generation in 2023.
- Spain's Canary Island of El Hierro relied solely on wind and hydropower for 24 days in 2019.
- Greece set a record of 5 hours without fossil fuel generation in 2022.
- Montenegro generated enough renewable electricity to power the entire country for 9 days in 2019.
The Future with Clean Flexibility:
- Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and other countries are modeling clean flexibility to achieve net-zero power systems by 2030 and 2040, respectively.
- By 2050, Spain is projected to run on 93% zero-carbon electricity.
Operational Time Horizon:
Clean flexibility addresses system needs across multiple timescales:
- Real-time balancing: Milliseconds to seconds.
- Daily ramping: Seconds to hours.
- Transmission bottlenecks: Minutes to hours.
- Peak events: Hours.
- Inter-day balancing: Days to weeks.
- Forecast error: Hours to days.
- Seasonal balancing: Months.
Forms of Clean Flexibility:
- Generation: Large renewable energy power plants that can adjust generation levels.
- Demand-side flexibility: Technologies that intelligently change electricity consumption patterns.
- Storage: Large energy storage technologies like batteries, pumped hydropower, and long-duration energy storage.
- Sector coupling: Converting electricity into other forms of energy (e.g., heat or renewable hydrogen).
- Grid technologies: Transmission infrastructure that enhances grid capability.
Outlook for European Clean Flexibility Growth:
- Clean flexibility capacity is expected to grow from roughly 150 GW in 2030 to over 700 GW by 2050.
- Key sources include pumped hydro, demand-side response, electric vehicles, behind-the-meter battery storage, and utility-scale battery storage.
Market Trends:
- Germany: Potential vs. deployment gap, with substantial demand-side flexibility potential but low smart meter penetration.
- UK: Sophisticated flexibility market, enabling both supply and demand-side solutions.
- Italy: Proven flexibility deployments, aiming for scale with policy rebalancing needed.
- Poland: Rapidly expanding renewables outpacing flexibility deployment, with curtailment and congestion costs high.
- Greece: Frequently operates at high renewable generation but curtails due to flexibility gaps.
- Bulgaria: Secured €600M for utility storage and community-scale hybrid projects.
- Turkey: Building flexibility into market rules from the start to attract investment in modern systems.
Scaling Up Clean Flexibility:
Five key areas underpin success:
- Market Design & Regulation: Refine policies, rebalance capacity mechanisms, and provide regulatory certainty.
- Consumer Engagement: Foster dynamic pricing and automation, scale proven solutions, and lower barriers to entry.
- Digital Infrastructure Foundation: Step up smart meter deployment, ensure interoperability, and enable real-time data access.
- Coordinated Grid Planning: Ensure flexibility-first grid planning and parallel deployment of storage and demand response.
- Enabling Policies, Sustained Support: Develop support policies based on experience from leading markets and commit to multi-year funding and policy stability.
