A hierarchical approach for balancing service provision by microgrids aggregators

Volatile renewable energy resources are gaining more and more diffusion throughout the power system, and their intermittent production calls for enhanced balancing efforts. With a recent regulation, the European Union endorsed the participation of aggregated microgrids to the balancing of power system. The resulting assets optimization problem, however, features privacy constraints that prevent a full exchange of information, making fully centralized approaches not suitable. To this purpose, this work proposes a hierarchical approach allowing microgrids' aggregators to provide balancing services in an efficient and privacy-friendly fashion. This approach is based on a novel method to describe the power flexibility that each microgrid can provide. allowing to significantly decrease the computational effort.