Aggregation and Disaggregation of Energetic Flexibility from Distributed Energy Resources

A variety of energy resources has been identified as being flexible in their electric energy consumption or generation. This energetic flexibility can be used for various purposes such as minimizing energy procurement costs or providing ancillary services to power grids. To fully leverage the flexibility available from distributed small-scale resources, their flexibility must be quantified and aggregated. This paper introduces a generic and scalable approach for flexible energy systems to quantitatively describe and price their flexibility based on zonotopic sets. The description proposed allows aggregators to efficiently pool the flexibility of large numbers of systems and to make control and market decisions on the aggregate level. In addition, an algorithm is presented that distributes aggregate-level control decisions among the individual systems of the pool in an economically fair and computationally efficient way. Finally, it is shown how the zonotopic description of flexibility enables an efficient computation of aggregate regulation power bid-curves.