Market Participation of Distributed Energy Resources for offering Flexibility Services

Nowadays, energy production from renewable energy sources influences system operation and makes more complex balancing generation and demand at every single point in time with enough security margins and calls for flexibility. The flexibility of demand and local generation is the key to avoiding massive infrastructural investments for network reinforcement. Still, the mutual impact on other grid operation aspects exists that can limit both Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs) to exploit benefits of flexibility fully. The paper aims at assessing at what extent the use of flexibility by the TSO can impact on the DSO activities and what are the expected costs. The methodology has been applied to a case study derived from a real distribution network for showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.