An Automated Technical Prequalification Process for Balancing Services by Small-scale Flexible Assets tested on a Redox Flow Battery

Abstract:
In the context of the German energy transition, the power system is undergoing a transformation that is reflected, among other aspects, in increasingly distributed power generation. This process will also have an ongoing impact on the energy balancing market with a reduction of available large power plants. In order to ensure a sufficient balancing market depth in the future, this paper suggests tapping unused potential and enabling the participation of small-scale flexible assets with a net installed power smaller than 1 MW. Besides regulatory adjustments, the general barrier of entrance has to be lowered and efficiency increased by avoiding manual processes, from the prequalification up to the billing of the supplied balancing energy. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for the technical prequalification of all three types of balancing energy, which paired with adequate validation mechanisms, is the first step of reducing the approval time from twelve weeks to less than two hours. The approach is validated on a 30 kW redox flow battery in a laboratory environment.