Med-TSO held the webinar “Mediterranean Grid Code and its application to the Maghreb Pilot Project”
On Wednesday 11 November 2020, Med-TSO held the webinar “Mediterranean Grid Code and its application to the Maghreb Pilot Project”.
The webinar showed the work carried out by Med-TSO in the last Mediterranean Project 1 & 2 for developing a shared set of technical rules and procedures that constitute the building blocks for the elaboration of the Mediterranean Grid Codes Guidelines. Grid codes are the technical and commercial requirements issued by the national authorities for all the grid users (production and consumption units as well as distribution companies with all their users) to connect them to the HV transmission networks and operate as per the standards.
The event was opened by Mohamed Ammar, PDG of STEG-Tunisia and President of COMELEC. In his speech, Ammar highlighted as “no one can succeed alone and the energy sector”, especially regarding the challenges coming from the exhaustion of fossil energy resources and the climate change, and that this was the founding idea of the Comelec, the Maghreb Electricity Committee (Comité Maghrébin de l’Electricité). He also stressed on the need of integration of the Maghreb electricity networks, including the harmonization of the rules for operating and developing the network, aiming to the establishment of an electricity market in the area. He concluded thanking Med-TSO for the interest shown by identifying the Maghreb region as the zone where to apply a pilot project.
After this High-level opening, the moderator Juan Manuel Rodriguez (REE-Spain), Chairman of Med-TSO Technical Committee Regulation and Institutions started the first session of the webinar. This was dedicated to two core aspects of the Mediterranean Grid Code: the common rules for sharing of system services, illustrated by Amer Taghreed Mostafa Kamel (EETC-Egypt), and the common process for the connection procedure, explained by Dimitrios Bechrakis (Ipto-Greece), both from the Technical Committee Regulation and Institutions.
Following a Q&A session, the second part of the webinar was dedicated to the introduction of a proposal of a zonal target regulatory framework in the Maghreb, with the presentation of the pilot Project. In this session, Mohamed Lakhdar Habib (Sonelgaz–Algeria) and Sofiene Ben Hadj Amor (STEG–Tunisia), from the same Med-TSO technical committee, showed the path followed to elaborate a zonal target regulatory framework and to draft the proposal for a Pilot project in the Maghreb region.
At the end of another interesting Q&A session, mostly focused on the current situation of the electricity exchanges from the Maghreb area towards near countries and about the cooperation with the Comelec, Juan Manuel Rodriguez concluded the webinar stressing, one more time, on the need of an effective multilateral cooperation to achieve the important goals of Med-TSO, especially for its new project TEASIMED.