Stacked Revenues Maximization of Distributed Battery Storage Units Via Emerging Flexibility Markets

Power system flexibility is seen as a key for addressing the management challenges in the future smart grids. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) can provide the necessary flexibility to: a) maintain a stable frequency and a secure energy supply in an overall system perspective, and b) maintain bus voltages and secure transfer capacities in their local networks. In this context, Flexibility Service Providers (FSPs) facilitate the management of the transmission and the distribution network, while at the same time they optimally exploit their DERs. This work proposes a bilevel model for an FSP owning distributed Battery Storage Units and participating in: i) wholesale Energy, Reserve and Balancing Markets, and ii) a novel distribution-level Flexibility Market. The developed model is applied to the IEEE 33-bus radial distribution system and the results demonstrate that it achieves superlinear gains. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to study the impact of several externalities on the FSP's decisions.