The increase of demand and production is linked to two root causes:
- Reservations & allocations of capacity: direct clients of distribution & transmission system operators can request additional capacity, which results in a reservation of allocation after the required procedures. In general, the request is backed up by a concrete project. Although it is possible that the project does not realize eventually, these capacities are considered in the reference operating state of the grid.
- Pre-reservations for potential future evolutions: to guarantee the presence of hosting capacity for reaching policy objectives with respect to the energy mix, as well as to guarantee margin for low voltage evolutions, pre-reservations of capacities are also included in the reference operating state of the grid. Only when a request for a specific technology could fill in such pre-reserved capacity, the pre-reservation is locally deactivated for the computation of the corresponding hosting capacity. For instance: a pre-reservation for onshore wind is deactivated locally when determining the hosting capacity for onshore wind.
These capacities are not yet present in reality, but their presence and evolution are foreseen according the latest prospections.