Opening of the Italian Ancillary Service Market to Distributed Energy Resources: Preliminary Results of UVAM project

The present paper deeply analyzes the main features and the preliminary results of the UVAM project: a pilot project launched in 2017 by the Italian Regulatory Authority that aims to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of the provision of ancillary services by Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), controllable loads, energy storage systems and e-mobility. Indeed, the rising of renewables and DERs penetration in the power system recently called for the enlargement of the pool of actors that can actively participate in the grid balancing. The UVAM project represents the first opening of the Italian Ancillary Service Market to distributed resources and, for the first time, a capacity remuneration is also added to remunerate the provision of ancillary services. The results for the period November 2018 - March 2020 are analyzed both from technical and economic perspective, highlighting the main difficulties faced in the experimentation, while trying to interpret the behavior adopted by Aggregators in this first phase of the project.