ENTSO-E and DSO Entity propose new energy digital twin use cases for Europe

The report details four use cases from key gaps that have been identified that can inform future goals. Broadly, these address consumer-centric flexibility, enhanced network planning and coordinated security assessment.

First, the report highlights how consumer flexibility is treated as disconnected processes with LV levels of observability and undefined aggregator interfaces. Second, grid planning lacks essential sector coupling and cross-operator alignment, while distributed energy resource capabilities like islanding and black-start for increased resilience remain underused or unexplored. Finally, operational security remains limited to isolated studies, missing the continuous, real-time coordination required for joint TSO–DSO decision-making.

Cluster 1 – Customers, business, market, data and information exchange 

The priority is to enable active consumer participation in explicit flexibility markets through standardised interfaces and improve real-time grid visibility across all voltage levels.

UC1 enables aggregators to manage and value consumer explicit flexibility (for all types of technologies) through standardised digital twin interfaces, real-time data and advanced analytics. Implementation ranges from foundational national solutions to fully integrated European platforms for automated cross-border flexibility trading.

Cluster 2 – System planning, future flexibility and asset lifecycle

The priority is to use predictive analytics for anticipatory investments, optimise hosting capacity and strengthen resilience with advanced measures like microgrids and islanding.

UC2.1 supports joint TSO–DSO planning through shared data, scenario-based methodologies, as well as harmonised assumptions, enabling anticipatory investment and optimised hosting capacity.

UC2.2 addresses resilience against high-impact, low-frequency events – such as extreme weather or large-scale technical faults – by modelling and simulating coordinated restoration strategies using distributed energy resource-based flexibility. 

Both use cases progress from basic coordination to pan-European digital twin environments for harmonised planning and recovery.       

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Cluster 3 – System operations, dynamics, and control rooms of the future.

The priority is to enhance forecasting and data aggregation, enable coordinated security analysis between TSOs and DSOs, and provide shared decision-support tools for control rooms.

UC3 enables coordinated TSO–DSO security assessments for congestion management, voltage control and dynamic stability. It evolves from secure data exchange and offline simulations to federated European platforms for real-time cross-border security coordination.

Together, these use cases demonstrate how coordinated TSO-DSO digital twin solutions can improve grid resilience, enable predictive and anticipatory decision-making, and support joint operational and planning processes across all voltage levels, the report states.

To translate these use cases into operational reality, operators must define specific functional and non-functional integration requirements, the report continues.

It adds that by combining strategic goals, actionable use cases and clear integration guidelines, it provides the founda¬tion for a roadmap to accelerate digitalisation and digital twin adoption. This will be part of a future deliverable, which is planned to describe a harmonised, interoperable approach that strengthens resilience and enhances flexibility, addressing current and future challenges of Europe’s electricity system.

The report, which builds on an earlier study identifying TSO and DSO digitalisation challenges, was developed under the ENTSO-E, DSO Entity joint task force on the digitalisation of the energy action plan (DESAP). 

TSO and DSO digital twin projects

Both ENTSO-E and the DSO Entity are involved in digital twin projects, ENTSO-E as a member of the TwinEU consortium and the DSO Entity as the leader of DSO4DT.

DSO4DT, focused on supporting digital twin advancements and uptake by DSOs, is now coming to the end of its first year. Progress to date includes a first outreach and engagement with the insights due to feed into a needs assessment to shape best practices, knowledge sharing and coordination activities.

TwinEU, the largest Horizon project by both budget and consortium membership, is now entering its third and final year, with much in the way of findings expected in the months ahead.

The latest release identifies six pan-EU scenarios for mapping more widely than within the original demos to ensure they are more widely scalable and deployable. These are a grid hosting capacity map, co-optimisation of the energy and balancing capacity market coupling with dynamic flow-based auction, high accuracy forecasting, flexibility management and frequency support, system security and stability and power line monitoring.