Backe Bjarup Ruwaida Change Management Sweden Capacity Challenge (CIRED 2019)

Backe, J., Bjarup, D., Ruwaida, Y. — “Change and Change Management - Unlocking Power Flexibility Meeting Sweden’s Capacity Challenge.” CIRED 2019, 25th International Conference on Electricity Distribution (Madrid, 3–6 June 2019), Paper n° 0583. Authors: John Backe and David Bjarup (E.ON Energidistribution AB), Yvonne Ruwaida (Vattenfall Eldistribution AB). Written at the outset of the CoordiNet project, before any demonstration results existed — this is the earliest source in the wiki’s CoordiNet lineage, and reference [23] in Source - Ruwaida et al TSO-DSO-Customer Coordination Swedish Demonstration (2022)‘s own citation list. Added to the vault by the maintainer, who is a co-author.

What the paper argues

Frames Sweden’s emerging grid-capacity problem as fundamentally a change-management challenge, not only a technical or investment one: unlocking flexibility requires new operating routines, planning culture, forecasting tools, TSO-DSO coordination, product development, and customer engagement simultaneously — not any single fix. Written as the two lead Swedish DSOs (Vattenfall, E.ON) and the TSO (Svk) were about to begin CoordiNet’s live market demonstrations.

Key findings

The capacity-shortage cost, quantified early. Citing a 2017 Pöyry report (“Trångt i elnäten”), the paper puts a number on what grid capacity constraints (not production shortage) were costing Sweden: ~8B/year, potentially rising to ~15B/year by 2030 if the situation didn’t improve — a figure the paper notes is “close to the net worth of the entire grid structure in Sweden.” The paper itself states this figure with no currency unit (no ”€” or “SEK” appears anywhere in the text) — an earlier version of this page asserted ”€” as if the paper specified it, which it does not; the Pöyry source (in Swedish) makes SEK at least as plausible a reading, and the two currencies differ roughly 10x. This is a macro cost estimate for the underlying problem CoordiNet, and later the entire Swedish local-flexibility-market landscape, was built to address.

Lead times, quantified: 5–7 years to build new regional-grid infrastructure, 10–15 years for transmission-grid infrastructure — set against customers whose capacity demands (data centers, battery production, EV charging, the nine government-agreed urban expansion zones) were “much more urgent than traditional grid planning processes allow for.”

Two-level Swedish DSO structure, as understood in 2019: local network (up to 50 kV, “DSO distribution network”) and regional network (70–130 kV, “DSO transmission network”). Note this predates the wiki’s more recent regionnät framing (40–130 kV, per Dir. 2026:83 and other sources) — the lower bound differs slightly across sources; not treated as a contradiction, just a range that varies by source and by which DSO’s own boundary is being described.

An explicit early forecast that materialized: the paper states the 2019 capacity problem “is not related to the national power balance regulated by Svk, but this is expected to change after 2030” — i.e., a congestion-only problem in 2019 was already expected to become an adequacy problem too. This is exactly what the wiki’s later adequacy content (LOLE, ERAA, Strategisk Reserv) documents as having happened.

The two DSOs’ parallel, deliberately complementary tracks: Vattenfall tested congestion management via bilateral treaties for load/production steering (the direct precursor to Villkorade Avtal); E.ON developed and tested digital marketplaces (the direct precursor to SWITCH). The paper frames these as two different learning perspectives on the same problem, brought together for the first time under CoordiNet — not independent, accidental developments. It also gives an early, practitioner-level verdict on bilateral treaties’ scalability that the later regulatory literature (Ei) would independently confirm: “bilateral treaties would result in very time-consuming and manual work… the nature of these contracts makes them more suitable for specific, smaller-scale agreements.”

Figure 2 — an early precursor to the “ten abilities” framework: a ten-area “wide approach on transformation” diagram (operating flexibility, TSO/DSO coordination, interfaces/APIs, real-time metering, flexibility product development, flexibility planning, grid forecasting, marketplace, load forecasting, customer engagement) — a more granular, earlier version of the “ten abilities framework” CoordiNet already documents from the project’s later reporting.

Full CoordiNet consortium list: Endesa, Comillas, Iberdrola, Red Eléctrica de España, Fundación Tecnalia, Nuestra Nueva Energía, Ayuntamiento de Málaga, Vattenfall Eldistribution, E.ON Energidistribution, Svenska Kraftnät, Uppsala Kommun, Energiforsk, Expektra, RWTH Aachen, DEDDIE (Greek DSO), IPTO (Greek TSO), ICCS, VITO, N-side, Engineering–Ingegneria Informatica, OFFIS, E.DSO, Etra I+D. This confirms RWTH Aachen and Energiforsk as full consortium members together — resolving the tentative discrepancy flagged when RWTH Aachen was first added to CoordiNet‘s consortium table from Ruwaida et al., 2022‘s acknowledgments alone.

Relevance to existing wiki topics

• CoordiNet — resolves the RWTH Aachen consortium question; origin-story context for Villkorade Avtal vs. SWITCH as deliberately parallel tracks; precursor to the ten-abilities framework
• Villkorade Avtal — earliest documented practitioner assessment of bilateral treaties’ scalability limits, predating the regulatory (Ei) version of the same conclusion
• Congestion Management — the 8B/15B (currency unspecified in the paper) macro cost-of-capacity-constraints figure, quantifying the scale of the problem that later, more granular DSO-level valuations (FlexAbility, etc.) address case by case
• SWITCH — E.ON’s digital marketplace work described here as one of the two founding tracks that became CoordiNet’s platform