  As the "smart grid" paradigm becomes more prevalent, fundamental
techno-economic challenges prominently arise. The variability of renewables may
require conventional generators to remain active and operate inefficiently. The
grid's inertia grows weaker, jeopardizing its stability. Network-related
problems become more prevalent, threatening the grid's security. Finally, the
industry experiences price cannibalization to extensive degrees, with frequent
negative prices and with renewable energy producers downregulating their
production in order to avoid severe penalties. To this day, no previous work
has provided a holistic analysis on how each energy asset could contribute to
grid management within the power market setting. This paper attempts to fill
this knowledge gap by investigating the "flexicurity" potential of energy
assets, in the context of smart grids and the so-called "2050 strategy". More
light is cast on their true value, thus better guiding network operators and
market players. To the above, we categorize all flexibility and security
capabilities of each energy asset, qualitatively grade their "performance". We
secondly introduce the concept of "flexicurity" and discuss a gradual shift
towards an alternative flexicurity-based market operation. Considering desired
state of the European power grid by 2050, we finally provide a
flexicurity-based overview of possible asset integration routes.
