A DER Registry System as an Infrastructural Component for future Smart Grid Applications

After the liberalization of energy markets in Europe the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) concept has been introduced to enable smaller Distributed Energy Resources (DER) to participate in larger markets. Although markets and processes between VPP-aggregators and smart grid actors, such as system operators and balance responsible parties, have been improved over the last years, a gap between DERs and aggregators still exits. Classical approaches assume aggregators with a fixed portfolio of DERs. But the increasing dynamics of the system, partially based on environmental dependent DERs (wind turbines, solar power), requires a common smart market for actively offering actual DER capabilities for adaptive aggregators. In this paper, we propose such a common active registry system which can be used by DERs to provide their capabilities actively and which helps aggregators to find DERs for short- and long-term business relationships. This would enable aggregators to dynamically adjust their VPPs to serve the needs of the smart grid actors and to reconfigure the VPP in case of failures. A prototype of the registry will be built in the EU-FP7 project Open System for Energy Services (OS4ES).