Other panellists also pointed out the fact that inertia, for all its potential, is a relatively new phenomenon, and a greater degree of maturity and comfort with the process will be necessary for inertia to become more widespread.
“It’s quite a new product,” said Luca Sternecker, project lead for the inertia market at TSO Tennet. “For the TSO side it emerged maybe three years ago.” Meanwhile Alexander Koehler, head of revenue management at Vattenfall, said that inertia is mostly “considered as an upside”, pointing to its relatively early-stage phase of development.
Improving technical understanding
Volker Schöller, CTO at solar solutions firm Schoenergie, went on to describe some of the technical challenges associated with the growth of inertia, beginning with DSOs, many of which are coming to inertia for the first time.
“What we see at the moment is that there are not many DSOs that have knowledge of the inertia market because we’re talking about 800 DSOs in Germany,” said Schöller. “For many of them the inertia market is completely new.
