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The innovative marketplace being developed as part of the EU-funded GLocalFlex project identifies market opportunities and incentives for owners of flexibility assets. It streamlines the procurement and activation of flexibility resources, enabling small consumers to participate independently in flexibility markets. The main design principles of the GLocalFlex marketplace are versatility, low entry barrier and adaptability. The marketplace is flexibility-agnostic and allows trading of any verifiable flexibility. It is based on three fundamental ideas:

1. Flexibility assets are managed via energy automation and a trading agent at location.
2. Flexibility trading matches sell and buy orders in a pay-as-bid auction, ensuring equal fairness to all parties.
3. All actions are automated to keep the transaction costs at minimum.

The marketplace aggregates smaller flexibilities and provides payments based on the flexibility offered. It serves in various roles in the project pilots, including technical aggregation, integrated marketplace, and peer-to-peer trading.

The GLocalFlex marketplace platform builds upon the legacy FLEXIMAR system, developed in the Business Finland-funded co-innovation project of the same name. In this system, the market’s matching engine operates as a two-sided single-tier double auction. Trading is based on flexibility amount, start-end times, and location, with price determining order priority. Flexibility providers activate resources, verified through reliable metering (such as smart meter data accessible to third parties in EU by 2025). Marketplace rules address dynamic remuneration in case of verification discrepancies. Even household consumers with advanced energy management can participate directly, as the marketplace aggregates smaller flexibility sell orders to match larger buy orders.

The GLocalFlex marketplace aims to create a competitive environment for flexibility buyers, encouraging participation from asset holders. To make it economically viable for households, a micropayment settlement system based on distributed ledger technology (such as blockchain) facilitates small fee transactions without intermediaries. Additionally, decentralized identifiers (DIDs) ensure low-cost, trusted user identification.

Pirkko Kuusela, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Machine Intelligence
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd.