Developing innovative electricity market designs to facilitate a sustainable transition to (near) 100% renewable power systems while meeting societal needs is a crucial and actual topic of research. This article presents preliminary key findings from the H2020 European project TradeRES, addressing this critical topic. The project uses agent-based and optimization models to effectively capture the behaviour of different market players, and to analyse the current and future power system energy mixes of selected European case studies with different physical and spatial scales from: i) local energy communities and local energy markets (LEMs); ii) national/regional - the Netherlands, Germany, and Iberia (Portugal and Spain); and iii) pan-European energy markets. The first results on LEMs indicate a substantial economic benefit for participants and enhanced revenue streams for distributed energy resources, able to i) incentivise further decentralised investments; ii) promote the growth of variable renewable energy systems (vRES) and iii) increase flexibility at the local level. The outcomes are sensitive to the tariffs’ structure, while the retail sector competitiveness was identified as a critical parameter affecting its efficiency. For the pan-European and national/regional case studies, the first set of simulations had consistent outcomes, namely, by pointing out current design of energy-only markets to be insufficient to incentivize the high levels of vRES foreseen in Europe. Different support schemes (e.g., fixed market premia, contract for differences) were tested and results suggest they may play a relevant role in effectively covering the cost of vRES in a market environment.@en

Digitalization is one of the key drivers for energy system transformation. The advances in communication technologies and measurement devices render available a large amount of operational data and enable the centralization of such data storage and processing. The greater access to data opens up new opportunities for a more efficient and decentralized management of the energy system. At the distribution level of the energy system, local electricity markets (LEMs) provide new degrees of flexibility by trading and balancing the energy locally and offering ancillary services to the wider transmission and distribution system operators. Maximizing the grid impact from this flexibility calls for novel data analytics and artificial intelligence techniques to enhance the system's security and reduce the energy costs of local prosumers. At the same time, however, relying on data-based approaches increases the risk of cyberattacks, and robust countermeasures are, therefore, needed as an integral aspect of digitalization efforts. This article discusses the key role of centralized data analytics to fully benefit from the advantages of LEMs in terms of system's security enhancement and energy costs' reduction. Data-driven paradigms are investigated that allow for flexibility from decentralized markets, mitigate the physical security risks, and devise defensive strategies shielding the system from cyber threats.@en