With the advent of digitalization and the widespread implementation of smart energy meters, new flexible loads on the low-voltage (LV) distribution networks have the potential to become key participants in the flexibility market, unlocking new business models. This paper focuses on electromobility aggregation standards and the technologies involved in providing balancing and ancillary services.

To operate on flexibility markets, aggregators shall rely both on a massive number of aggregated charging points and on a robust, scalable and interoperable IT infrastructure. To this end, the Italian Electrotechnical Committee (CEI) has published a regulation (CEI 0-21 – Annex X) and a Public Available Specification (PAS 57-127) prescribing a general framework for the aggregation of private charging infrastructures connected to LV grid.

The standard defines functional specifications of the Recharge Infrastructure Controller (CIR), which is a control system implementing different interfaces for local data collection and communication with the Remote Operator (RO). The Remote Operator is a resource flexibility aggregator actively participating in the electricity market.

By controlling multiple charging sessions, the RO can offer grid services such as load shift during off-peak hours, ancillary services for secondary and tertiary reserve and local balancing services for DSOs. To assess the potentials of the CIR/RO model for the provision of grid services, RSE has conducted an experimental campaign, supported also by the Italian Regulator (ARERA), creating an aggregate of domestic recharging points.

In this activity, RSE acted as Remote Operator, setting up an IT infrastructure for field data collection and remote control of CIRs. Thanks to the Chain 2 protocol, the CIR installations did not require any intervention on the existing electrical systems, immediately allowing real time power flows monitoring of the house. It was verified that the CIR control logics guarantees the continuity of electricity supply to the house, even while performing smart charging commands set from the Remote Operator.

Following the success of the first experimental phase, RSE has launched a second phase, aimed at improving the security of the communication system, in order to make it secure and robust at a national scale, where millions of EV Charging Points will be connected. For this reason, in the near future RSE is going to test and validate the IT platform described in PAS 57-127 which is based on the XMPP protocol and the TLS (Transport Layer Security) security protocol.