Current and future balancing services: needs and quantification methods

Balancing services contain those ancillary services through which system operators ensure, in a continuous way and over all time scales, the maintenance of system frequency within a predefined stability range. The increasing introduction of inverter-based resources (IBRs) could put frequency stability at risk, asking for reliable balancing services, which have been mainly provided in the past by thermal and hydro power generation.

This project focuses on the one hand on the methods to compute the reserves in terms of power and energy needed. Current methods will be reviewed and extended by means of probabilistic approaches. The methods will be applied to the principal balancing products (FCR, aFRR, mFRR, RR) and to different European countries of interest. On the other hand, this project focuses on the identification of new balancing services to address frequency stability issues of future power systems with time-varying dominance of IBRs. Relevant indicators will be sought to quantify the need for new services and the appropriate market mechanisms will be discussed and evaluated.

The successful candidate will lead the project from a technical point of view. This project contributes to the improvement of reliability and resilience of power systems under high penetration of IBRs.