Facilitating flexibility trading between asset owners and system operators

Abstract

As the electrical grid becomes more constrained and grid reinforcement/expansion is no longer the only viable solution, electric flexibility is slowly becoming a more practical approach. Additionally, with the increasingly greater share of flexible devices being deployed, there is immense potential to solve this problem. While flexibility provision is already an implemented market mechanism, it mostly revolves around large industries that have more predictable behavior. At the residential or distribution level, said flexibility is harder to harvest due to the unpredictability and heterogeneity of the systems and actors involved. This report’s focus is creating a protocol facilitating the flexibility exchange between asset owners and the grid operator. In order to bridge these two actors, an aggregator program is created with the task of managing in a responsible way these exchanges. The protocol has used The Green Village, an aggregate of smart residential housing located on the TU Delft campus, as a physical system to base the protocol and program. Although The Green Village has been used as a reference, the protocol and program should be versatile for any application. The main goal, when developing the protocol, was to have the aggregator program take in as many tasks related to flexibility exchanges as possible to increase compatibility (interoperability). The protocol and aggregator program were also designed to facilitate modifications and upgrades (plug-and-play) while preventing communication errors (redundancy). To fulfill these requirements, the report takes the following structure. First, the different methods and frameworks enabling flexibility as well as involved actors are discussed. Then the protocol and aggregator program are explained in depth. Finally, a validation through simulation is presented and inspected.