Service stacking on residential BESS: RES integration by flexibility provision on ancillary services markets

Abstract

Opening the Balancing Markets (BMs) to Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) could support the integration of RES in decarbonizing power systems; nevertheless, the limited energy content of BESS can reduce their reliability on the BMs. A novel control strategy for revenue stacking of behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter services on a domestic prosumer equipped with photovoltaic production and BESS is presented in this study. The aim is to maximize self-consumption and the economics while guaranteeing BESS state-of-charge management. A new control (and bidding) strategy is developed to offer the available energy (and power) margins on the Italian BMs, without saturating or depleting the energy content. The results show synergies between self-consumption maximization and flexibility provision, i.e., the proposed approach demonstrates how a multiservice-oriented operation of BESS improves the economic sustainability of the solution, with a payback time between 5 to 9 years, decreases the energy exchange with the public grid and the RES imbalance (imbalance reduced by 90%), and provides flexibility with high reliability (ranging 89%–97%). Due to this, the strategy of reducing the imbalance of variable RES and then providing flexibility with the left margins candidates itself as a standard routine for massively integrating RES via BESS.