CRE (Commission de régulation de l'énergie), France's independent energy regulator, approved experimental rules on Thursday 30 July for local flexibility markets run on the RTE and Enedis platforms1. RTE operates the French high-voltage transmission grid; Enedis runs the distribution network that reaches almost every French connection point. Under the deliberation, grid operators may procure demand response and distributed storage at distribution level for the first time under an authorised French framework.
Set that against StromVKG, Germany's centralised capacity mechanism, whose first 4.5 GW auction opened on 21 July. Germany's Bundesnetzagentur buys firm capacity centrally, in gigawatt blocks, at a single national clearing price. CRE is testing whether flexibility can instead be bought where the physical constraint actually sits, on a distribution feeder.
Neither design follows from ideology. A capacity auction procures megawatts that exist somewhere on the system and assumes the network can move them; a local flexibility market procures a response at the node where the network cannot. Which design wins depends on whether Europe's binding constraint over the next decade turns out to be generation adequacy or grid congestion, and nobody can yet answer that. The pre-dawn hours of 31 July, when German wind bottomed out and prices ran to their highest of the week, are the hours both designs exist to serve.
