Consensus-based Coordination of Battery Energy Storage Systems for Frequency Regulation Service

Battery energy storage systems (BESSs) have been widely adopted in providing ancillary services, e.g., frequency regulation, to the power system. Existing studies usually focus on the accurate tracking of regulation signal, while overlook the heterogeneous cost in actuating different BESS units, which might lead to a less cost-efficient operation. In this paper, we present a convex optimization model to describe the cost-aware power allocation problem of BESSs in tracking regulation signal. Considering privacy protection and scalability, we propose a consensus-based algorithm for BESS coordination in a fully-distributed manner. The optimal power allocation among BESSs is achieved by exchanging auxiliary variables within the local neighborhood, which protects the privacy and promotes the scalability. Several numerical experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The optimal power allocations in individual time intervals are validated, and the collective tracking performance of the BESS units is illustrated. The economic benefit of the cost-aware power allocation strategy is also demonstrated in the case study.