An Economical Optimization for the Participation of a Residential Microgrid in Flexibility Markets Providing Ancillary Services

The growing number of renewable energies based distributed energy resources and new loads such as electric vehicles are creating uncertainty and instability in the grid and thus increasing the need to provide ancillary services and other flexibility resources. This paper deals with an economical optimization of power reservation of energy storage systems in a residential microgrid to provide ancillary services and thus participating in flexibility markets by receiving economic incentives. The study proposes an energy management system for a residential microgrid that includes household loads, photovoltaic generation, energy storage systems and electric vehicles. The economic objective of reducing electricity bill and the technical goal of providing ancillary services by reserving a fixed power capacity of the energy storage systems along with including grid congestion constraint are achieved by designing and testing a genetic algorithm with suitable parameters to define new set-points of operation for the energy storage systems and the charging/discharging of electric vehicles.