Dispersed generation to provide ancillary services: AlpStore project

In the future, electrical systems should be able to integrate all users at the same time and guarantee power quality, stability and safety over time. The integration of renewable energy sources leads to new issues involving the intermittence of this generation typology. A high penetration of intermittent power plants will reduce the capability of the system to overcome critical events (e.g. frequency oscillations and voltage profile perturbation). This work presents new regulation schemes/functions developed in the AlpStore project framework, devoted to managing dispersed generation in order to provide ancillary services to the main grid. The work developed can be split into two main items: reactive injection regulation and frequency control regulation. The first regulation is devoted to increasing the Hosting Capacity of the distribution grid (i.e. it results to be a local control), whereas the latter aims to guarantee the energy balance of the national electric grid (i.e. it could be classified as a grid control).