The liberalisation of the electricity market presented European countries with major challenges. Structures that had grown over decades had to be broken up in order to decouple transmission grids from energy producers. In Switzerland, this demanding task was taken on by Swissgrid AG, which was founded in 2006 by seven large Swiss electricity interconnection companies. In a first step, Swissgrid took over the coordination of the Swiss transmission grid, which consists of eight control areas. Then, on New Year's Eve 2008, the big step was taken: with the date change, the Swissgrid was transferred into one control area. This was achieved without consumers noticing anything.
Since the beginning of 2013, Swissgrid AG has been the owner of the Swiss transmission grid, which includes the entire 6,700 km long extra-high voltage grid as well as 147 switching stations and 21 transformers. As of now, the company is responsible for the ongoing operation, maintenance, renewal and future-oriented expansion of the grid in terms of hardware and software.
In addition to the network hardware, IT and software are becoming increasingly important in modern electricity networks to ensure stable network operation. European grids are growing closer together, the share of renewable energy sources that feed highly fluctuating electrical energy into grids is growing, battery power plants are being built as buffers, smart grids are being formed, consumers are becoming prosumers, cities are becoming smart - all this is part of a development that is turning transmission grids into highly complex structures. AI and GAI will take over a good part of the control tasks in the future.
In addition to grid stability, liberalised electricity markets need efficient pricing models and platforms to balance supply and demand fairly in a minimum of time. Pricing for balancing energy calls takes place on the PICASSO platform (Platform for the International Coordination of Automated Frequency Restoration and Stable System Operation), coordinated by ENTSO-E, the association of European transmission operators. And since the speed of price formation plays the central role in modern markets, HAKOM time series technology is used at Swissgrid for sophisticated calculation processes based on second-by-second data.
