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Renewable Energy Sources (RES) have taken on an increasingly important role in the energy mix in the last few years, and it has been forecasted that this trend will continue in the future. The energy production from these sources is not dispatchable, and the increasing penetration of RES in energy mixes may therefore lead to a progressive loss of generation control and predictability. It has become clear that, to reach higher RES penetration levels, it is essential to increase power system flexibility in order to ensure stable operations are maintained. An ICT (Information and Communication Technology) tool that may be used to manage and optimize the flexibility offered by energy storage and conversion systems is described in this paper with specific reference to the Decision Support System (DSS) developed within the H2020 PLANET (PLAnning and operational tools for optimizing energy flows and synergies between energy NETworks) project. The paper focuses on how the PLANET DSS tool evaluates, manages, and dispatches the flexibility of Power to Gas/Heat (P2X) technologies. Moreover, the tool has been used to analyze a realistic case in order to show how the PLANET DSS tool could be used to evaluate the energy and economic benefits of taking advantage of the flexibility of P2X technologies.Energies 2020, 13, 153 2 of 16 allow flexibility to be increased thanks to interconnections between energy sectors [12,13]. Moreover, energy systems are becoming more and more costumer centric, and in this context it becomes very important to be able to define appropriate systems of measurement and prediction of energy flows [14] in order to be able to analyze the flexibility potential within energy systems.In these scenarios, energy flows within energy systems are somewhat complicated and intricate, due to the interconnection of different energy networks and the increase in stochasticity resulting from distributed generation. For this reason, it is important to have computer simulation tools available to analyze these interconnected energy flows and to evaluate the energy and economic impact of different technologies and regulations on the entire system [15,16].A specific ICT DSS tool has been proposed by The EU-Funded H2020 PLANET project [17] to analyze and optimize the flexibility of P2X energy conversion technologies. The project provides an ICT platform to support network operators/planners, P2X plant managers, load aggregators, and policy makers in order to increase the integration of renewables.Several software programs are available in the literature to simulate energy flows in a Multi Energy System (MES) [16,18,19]. The main advantage of using the PLANET DSS lies in the fact that the tool is built on a web platform: through the web platform, the users can setup and execute a remote simulation, and in this way the various actors can benefit from using a dedicated super-computer for their simulation, to which they would otherwise not have access. Moreover, due to middleware-based communication, Demand-Response (DR) signals ...

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The increasing resort to renewable energy distributed generation, which is needed to mitigate anthropogenic CO2 emissions, leads to challenges concerning the proper operation of electric distribution systems. As a result of the intrinsic nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), this generation shows a high volatility and a low predictability that make the balancing of energy production and consumption difficult. At the same time, the electrification of new energy-intensive sectors (such as heating) is expected. This complex scenario paves the way for new sources of flexibility that will have more and more relevance in the coming years. This paper analyses how the electrification of the heating system, combined with an electric flexibility utilisation module, can be used to mitigate the problems related to the fluctuating production of RES. By using Power-to-Heat (P2H) technologies, buildings are able to store the overproduction of RES in the form of thermal energy for end-use according to the principle of the so-called Virtual Energy Storage (VES). A context-aware demand flexibility extraction based on the VES model and the flexibility upscale and utilisation on district-level through grid simulation and energy flow optimisation is presented in the paper. The involved modules have been developed within the PLANET (PLAnning and operational tools for optimising energy flows and synergies between energy NETworks) H2020 European project and interact under a unified co-simulation framework with the PLANET Decision Support System (DSS) for the analysis of multi-energy scenarios. DSS has been used to simulate a realistic future energy scenario, according to which the imbalance problems triggered by RES overproduction are mitigated with the optimal exploitation of the demand flexibility enabled by VES.