Flexibility-expansion planning for enhanced balancing-power market participation of decentralized energy systems

Abstract

The rising share of renewable energy sources in power supply and the shut-down of conventional power plants lead to a need for new providers of balancing power. Balancing-power could be newly provided by the flexibilization of decentralized energy systems. In this contribution, we propose flexibility-expansion planning for decentralized energy systems to account for investments in additional units for flexibilization. Flexibility-expansion planning leads to a stochastic optimization model for optimal investment decisions towards increased operational flexibility. The stochastic optimization model consists of a design optimization and a two-stage stochastic program. In a case study, the method is applied to a decentralized energy system participating in the German tertiary balancing-power market. Savings of up to 5.9 % can be achieved with additional investments in heat storage. Thus, flexibility-expansion planning allows operators of decentralized energy systems to optimally invest in flexible technologies for improved balancing-power market participation.