"The participation of small-scale variable distributed renewable energy sources to the balancing services market"

This article was published in Energy Economics and written by Marco Agostini (DII and Interdepartmental Centre for Energy Economics and Technology "Giorgio Levi-Cases", University of Padova), Marina Bertolini (Department of Economics and Management University of Padova), Massimiliano Coppo (DII, University of Padua) and Fulvio Fontini (Department of Economics and Management University of Padova).

The paper considers different market settings for the participation to the balancing services market of small scale variable renewable energy sources connected to the distribution grid. By mixing an economical and a technical approach, it evaluates the efficiency of participation to the market under two distinct approaches to resources' aggregation: a commercial scheme and a technical one. As a general outcome of this research, it is shown that providing balancing energy based on a commercial approach is preferable as long as renewables' curtailment penalty is low and local generators have correlated forecast errors (as in the case of photovoltaic units) with a large reserve capacity. High penalties for curtailment and lower correlation among generation schedule deviations, along with a lower reserve by distributed units, make the technical approach more convenient.

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