Aggregation Platform to Maximize the Utilization of Distributed Energy Resources' Flexibility

The Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) are making up a significant part of the energy production mix. At the same time, aggregated demand-side management of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) is emerging as a new way to participate in Ancillary Services Markets (ASM). A major barrier to the integration of the services potentially provided by DERs’ Aggregators into the markets is the knowledge of current and future “aggregated flexible capacity”, or rather the lack of such a knowledge. The PASCAL Project developed a flexibility aggregation platform: a software tool allows the Aggregator to create a powerful Virtual Power Plant able to quantify the current and future flexible capacity of a cluster of DERs. Moreover, the platform enables the Aggregator to optimize the DERs’ flexibility trading that can be used in both energy and ancillary services markets.