SWARM - strategies for providing frequency containment reserve power with a distributed battery storage system

Virtual power plants can participate in energy markets. This paper presents the modeling approach used in the current research project SWARM for simulating the frequency containment reserve (FCR) power provision with a virtual mass storage. It participates in the German FCR market since July 2015 and is composed of battery energy storage systems (ESSs), which are in fact installed in households with roof-top PV plants and by this means increase the household's internal PV-converted power consumption and offer FCR power at the same time. The paper investigates the effects of more sever restrictions on FCR power provision as have recently been required by the German TSOs. These restrictions translate to relatively small bounds for the state of charge (SOC) of the batteries and have a significant influence on the household's profitability of installing an ESS.