The electrification of households and some industrial processes, combined with an increase in the number of electric vehicles on the road, is causing a substantial increase in the electrical load on medium- and low-voltage distribution networks. To some extent, this increase in load is offset by local, mostly uncontrollable renewable generation, which is also growing steadily. However, new distributed generation can in turn also cause more or less occasional overloads on the distribution grid. These factors are increasingly causing undesirable situations on the distribution grid, such as congestion or large variations in voltage and power factor. One of the possible solutions to these problems is the opening of a market for local services, where the Distribution System Operator (DSO) can find the necessary resources to solve the problems, without necessarily resorting to significant investments in strengthening the networks. Another major possibility is that the same distributed resources are used to help meet the growing demand for dispatching services from the Transmission System Operator (TSO).
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of such local services, which would be combined with participation in the Dispatch Services Market (DSM), a market simulator for local services was implemented to meet the needs of the DSO by taking advantage of the flexibility of distributed resources. Initial results obtained from the analyses conducted on the market simulator showed that the proposed platform is a viable solution to distribution network congestion compensation. With these assumptions, the average annual cost of the DSO to procure local services is around 94 €/MWh; this cost may vary depending on the error made on load forecasts, currently about 10%.
During the research activity carried out, monitoring of the pilot project “Aggregazione Sistemi di Accumulo Lombardi” was also continued and concluded, which concerns the aggregation of Storage Systems (SS) for residential application located in Lombardy with the aim of providing services on MSD. The experimentation has promoted the participation of small-scale distributed resources in the MSD and highlighted existing critical issues that will need to be addressed to fully exploit their flexibility.