Usage of telecommunication base station batteries in demand response for frequency containment disturbance reserve: Motivation, background and pilot results

Electrical power systems are undergoing a major change globally. Ever increasing penetration of volatile renewable energy is making the balancing of electricity generation and consumption challenging, forcing transmission system operators to spend increasing amounts of money for ancillary services. This creates interesting opportunities for demand side assets, that would be able to adjust their power consumption. Paper focuses on the potential and feasibility of using existing battery systems in telecommunications base stations as an aggregated and highly distributed asset for frequency containment disturbances reserve. Potential for base stations to participate in demand response was found to be high, due to the characteristics of reserve type (e.g. predicted number of activations, required activation length and power) and the simulation results from a prepared model that indicated a negligible impact that performing these operations would have on the battery systems, their expected lifetime and ability to protect the critical telecommunications loads.