Towards Efficient Aggregation of Storage Flexibilities in Power Grids

Abstract:
The increasing penetration of volatile renewables combined with increasing demands poses a challenge to modern power grids. Furthermore, distributed energy resources and flexible devices (electric vehicles, PV generation, …) are becoming more widespread, making their aggregate usage for ancillary services interesting. However, accurately quantifying the aggregate flexibility of numerous flexible devices is known to be limited by the curse of dimensionality, i.e., it does not scale well computationally. This has led to the development of various approximation algorithms. In this study, we improve upon our previously proposed vertex-based inner approximation, extending it to more general storage devices. We demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of the proposed method in a case study comparing our approach with an exact centralized control framework, where the flexibility of numerous electric vehicles is combined to reduce the peak load in a residential area.