Flexibility Provision by an Aggregate of Electric Boilers in the Italian Regulatory Framework

The present work provides a numerical evaluation of the flexibility that an aggregate of electric boilers can supply to the power system in the Italian framework. To this purpose, the paper firstly outlines the current national regulations regarding the provision of flexibility by distributed energy resources. Then, considering the Italian discipline as a reference, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the regulating capability of an aggregate of electric boilers. In the analysis, the effects on the users' thermal comfort are also taken into account. To control boilers, enabling the provision of ancillary services, a heuristic based on a Greedy-Indexing algorithm is proposed, while the hot water usage is simulated by real data. The heuristic strategy implemented resulted to be particularly effective, enabling the provision of services without introducing significant detrimental effects on the users' thermal comfort.