Balancing Services Provision via Optimization and Management of the Flexibility Offered by a Pool of Energy Resources

Abstract

Aggregators of energy resources providing balancing services to the grid face the twofold challenge of assessing the overall amount of flexibility of the pool of energy resources, and mapping the power requests by the grid back to each single energy resource during the service window. In this article, we propose a framework that allows to jointly optimize the power flexibility limits and determines the disaggregation policy for managing the pool of energy resources, thus avoiding an additional computational step in the operational service phase. The baseline power exchange profiles of the energy resources can also be optimized to enhance the pool flexibility, and practical constraints such as time availability of the resources within the service window or network congestion constraints can be included. Notably, the resulting optimization problem is amenable for privacy-preserving and scalable distributed resolution schemes.