Engineering inertial and primary-frequency response for distributed energy resources

A significant body of research has emerged for adapting diverse intelligent distributed energy resources to provide primary frequency reserves (PFR). However, such works are usually vague about the technical specifications for PFR. Industrial practitioners designing systems for PFR markets must pre-qualify their PFR resources against the specifications of the market operator, which is usually a transmission system operator (TSO) or independent system operator (ISO). TSO and ISO requirements for PFR have been underspecified with respect to real-time performance, but as fossil-fuel based PFR is being replaced by various distributed energy resources, these requirements are being tightened. The TSOs of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have recently released a joint pilot phase specification with novel requirements on the dynamic performance of PFR resources. This paper presents an automated procedure for performing the pre-qualification procedure against this specification. The procedure is generic and has been demonstrated with a testbed of light emitting diode (LED) lights. The implications of low bandwidth Internet of Things communications, as well as the need to avoid abrupt control actions that irritate human users, have been investigated in the automated procedure.

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A Virtual Power Plant Solution for Aggregating Photovoltaic Systems and Other Distributed Energy Resources for Northern European Primary Frequency Reserves

Energies ◽

10.3390/en14051242 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (5) ◽

pp. 1242

Author(s):

Rakshith Subramanya ◽

Matti Yli-Ojanperä ◽

Seppo Sierla ◽

Taneli Hölttä ◽

Jori Valtakari ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Power Plant ◽

Power Plants ◽

Energy Resources ◽

Distributed Energy Resources ◽

Photovoltaic Systems ◽

Virtual Power ◽

Distributed Energy ◽

Virtual Power Plant ◽

Virtual Power Plants ◽

Primary Frequency

Primary frequency reserves in Northern Europe have traditionally been provided with hydro plants and fossil fuel-burning spinning reserves. Recently, smart distributed energy resources have been equipped with functionality needed to participate on frequency reserves. Key categories of such resources include photovoltaic systems, batteries, and smart loads. Most of these resources are small and cannot provide the minimum controllable power required to participate on frequency reserves. Thus, virtual power plants have been used to aggregate the resources and trade them on the frequency reserves markets. The information technology aspects of virtual power plants are proprietary and many of the details have not been made public. The first contribution of this article is to propose a generic data model and application programming interface for a virtual power plant with the above-mentioned capabilities. The second contribution is to use the application programming interface to cope with the unpredictability of the frequency reserve capacity that the photovoltaic systems and other distributed energy resources are able to provide to the frequency reserves markets in the upcoming bidding period. The contributions are demonstrated with an operational virtual power plant installation at a Northern European shopping center, aggregating photovoltaic Primary Frequency Reserves resources.

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