Towards a New Energy Reserves Market: The Role of EV Aggregators

The efficient participation of storage and demand aggregators in electricity markets is hindered by a misalignment between the markets’ bidding language and these new players’ technical characteristics. Specifically, we focus on day-ahead (DA) provision of frequency restoration reserves, where each market participant is asked to declare its reserve capacity for each timeslot of the following day. However, flexible assets bear cross-temporal characteristics (namely, limited energy) that cannot be communicated within the market’s existing bidding language and may leave such assets unable to deliver their allocated reserves. To this end, this paper adopts a novel reserve product, termed Energy Reserves, which effectively addresses such service availability issues. Specifically, in this paper, we elaborate on how this product would enable Electric Vehicle (EV) aggregators to accurately communicate their flexibility capabilities to System Operators (SOs). We present the relevant mathematical formulations and illustrative examples of how the new framework would function. Furthermore, we present a Six-Criteria filtering method, through which the SO can pre-select which aggregators will be asked to contribute, so that the SO’s administrative burden is drastically reduced. Our simulations demonstrate that this reduction in the communication overhead comes without an analogous reduction in the dispatch efficiency. Specifically, the 25% of top-ranked EV aggregators can contribute, on average, to about 80% of selected, real imbalance scenarios.