Bringing Distributed Energy Storage to Market

Spatially distributed energy storage devices can provide additional flexibility to system operators, which is needed to transition from primarily fossil fuel based electricity generation to variable renewable generation. Aggregators in charge of controlling distributed energy storage can take advantage of existing economic incentives for more flexibility. However, controlling large numbers of energy storage devices with individual constraints in accordance with the strict rules of existing energy and reserve markets is challenging. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the design and performance of a system that enables aggregators to bring large numbers of dedicated and fully controllable energy storage devices to multiple markets concurrently. In particular, we propose algorithms and heuristic optimization methods that allow aggregators to control such energy resources in accordance with arbitrary market rules and participation strategies. Our evaluation is based on a realistic dual market (reserve and intra-day energy) use case. We find that effective market-conform control of large numbers of energy storage devices using the proposed algorithms is feasible, even on short time scales. Furthermore, our results also indicate that the scalability of the proposed system design can be further improved via parallelization without limiting the reserve/energy brought to market.