Currently, the electrical system is undergoing a phase of rapid change due to the increasingly massive penetration of generation from non-programmable renewable sources to pursue the objectives proposed by the European Union. To address this transformation, which poses numerous challenges for the electrical system, it is a priority that network codes evolve, in order to introduce new system services and extend the range of service providers. Services will therefore be provided not only by conventional generators, as in the traditional regulatory framework, but also by renewable generators, loads and storage systems.

This study focuses on frequency regulation services using a particular control technique known as Model Predictive Control (MPC). The peculiarity of this approach, when compared with more conventional methods such as proportional-integral control, is the possibility of taking system and control constraints into account more effectively.

After a careful study of the scientific literature on network services and the control strategies to implement them, a particular application was selected, for which a management and control strategy based on MPC appears promising. This application consists in the ‘ultra-rapid’ frequency regulation service as defined by the Italian transmission network operator (Terna) in the Fast Reserve pilot project, in which units composed of renewable generation systems, storage systems and loads combined in different configurations can take part. For this purpose, control strategies were created and validated by means of simulations, both for units composed of stand-alone electrochemical storage systems and for hybrid units composed of a storage system and a wind farm.