Regional Coordination Centres’ reporting – progress made, more improvements needed

Today, ACER publishes its third monitoring report on the reporting obligations of Regional Coordination Centres (RCCs) for 2024, and its new RCC monitoring dashboard.

Regional Coordination Centres (RCC) were introduced in 2022 with the Electricity Regulation to facilitate coordination among electricity transmission system operators (TSOs) across regions. They contribute to grid stability, security of supply, and the EU’s energy and climate goals. RCCs are required to report on the outcome of their activities, including:

• operational performance;
• coordinated actions;
• issued recommendations; and
• designated tasks.

What is in the ACER monitoring report?  

This report covers RCC’s self-reporting efforts in 2024 and, for the first time, more detailed information on 4 tasks requested by ACER: 

• week-ahead to at least day-ahead adequacy assessments;
• outage planning coordination;
• seasonal adequacy assessments;
• training and certification of RCC staff.

With this dashboard, stakeholders are able to assess implementation progress of RCCs’ tasks and compare the RCCs in Europe. The monitoring will be expanded over time to cover all 16 RCC tasks.

What did ACER monitoring find?  

RCCs continued advancing their activities in 2024. Currently, 7 tasks are in operation across all RCCs:

• common grid model;
• short-term adequacy;
• outage planning coordination;
• defence and restoration plan consistency;
• training and certification;
• post-disturbance analysis; and
• crisis scenarios.

This compared with 4 tasks in operation for 2023 and none in 2022. ACER welcomes this progress.

However, ACER finds that: 

• key performance indicators (KPIs) remain difficult to compare across RCCs due to regional differences in the KPI design, and data quality issues;
• Supporting restoration, the optimisation of inter-TSO settlement, seasonal adequacy assessments, needs for new infrastructure remain at an early stage of development or have not yet been requested by transmission system operators.

In terms of performance, ACER encourages RCCs to:

• swiftly implement all their tasks and improve data quality;
• expand capacity calculation and security analysis across different timeframes and regions;
• focus on improving common grid model results to facilitate long-term readiness;
• enhance the scope of short-term adequacy, outage planning and training and certification of staff;
• align key performance indicators (KPIs) across regions; and
• issue recommendations as well as oversee their implementation. 

In terms of improving their reporting practices, ACER calls on RCCs to: 

• clearly distinguish between regional processes and pan-European ones;
• use common criteria and overview tables to present task implementation status; and
• further explain how the “rotation principle” is applied for pan-European tasks.

What are the next steps?

The next ACER monitoring report is scheduled for December 2026.

ACER intends to expand its monitoring to additional RCC tasks in the future. 

Check out ACER’s new RCC dashboard.