Primary Control by ON/OFF Demand-Side Devices

We consider an aggregator managing a portfolio of ON/OFF demand-side devices. The devices are able to shift consumption in time within certain energy limitations; moreover, the devices are able to measure the system frequency and switch ON and OFF accordingly. We show how the aggregator can manage the portfolio of devices to collectively provide a primary reserve delivery in an unbundled liberalized electricity market setting under current regulations. Furthermore, we formulate a binary linear optimization problem that minimizes the aggregator´s cost of providing a primary reserve delivery of a given volume, and demonstrate this method on numerical examples.