This year’s report emphasizes ISGAN’s ongoing commitment to accelerating the global energy transition through smarter, more flexible, and resilient electricity systems. It highlights the network’s role in fostering knowledge exchange, supporting policy frameworks, and promoting best practices across its diverse member base.

A central focus of the 2024 report is the continued development of ISGAN’s flagship initiative, the Lighthouse Project. Now entering its second phase, the project centers on long-term planning and implementation of smart distribution grids under uncertainty. Key outputs include a widely recognized Policy Brief, the launch of the ISGAN Knowledge Hub, and a global series of workshops engaging stakeholders from 20 countries.

The report also documents major events such as the ExCo27 meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, the ExCo28 meeting in Incheon, Republic of Korea, and the ISGAN Awards, as well as the network’s active participation in the 15th Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM15) and 9th Mission Innovation (MI-9) meetings. These gatherings provided opportunities to showcase ISGAN’s contributions to the global “Agenda for Action on Power Systems Solutions”.

In addition, the report features updates from ISGAN’s six Working Groups, each contributing to key themes such as flexibility, digitalization, interoperability, and resilience. It also includes a summary of the Virtual Learning webinars and a comprehensive list of publications released throughout the year.

The electricity system is transforming due to renewable energy integration, decentralized generation, and digitalization. The traditional unidirectional grid is evolving into a dynamic, bidirectional system with distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar, wind, EVs, and storage. This shift, along with electrification and decarbonization goals, requires enhanced coordination to maintain reliability and efficiency.

By gathering experience and insights gained from global pilot projects in the field of providing flexibility for coordinated capacity management of transmission and distribution system operators, a holistic overview of the ongoing developments in the integration of flexibility can be presented.

The overall study highlights that improved TSO-DSO-stakeholder coordination significantly enhances grid stability and efficiency.

Key findings include the need for:

• Enhanced TSO-DSO coordination
• Investment in advanced grid technologies
• Improved market mechanisms for flexibility
• Clear regulatory frameworks
• Stakeholder engagement
• Continuous knowledge exchange

The paper discusses three key topics in detail:

• Market-Based Flexibility Procurement by DSOs
• Supporting Grid Tools for Active System Management
• Applicability of Flexibility Mechanisms and their trade-off with Investments

The discussion paper raised several challenges and proposed different solutions to overcome these challenges.

Illustration of the main challenges for market-based flexibility procurement by DSOs considering the participation of demand-side flexibility

Overall, the paper concludes that the challenge of integrating flexibility in the DSO sphere is complex, necessitating additional guidance and research on how to correctly trade-off between different flexibility mechanisms and grid investments.