Decentralized and discretized control for storage systems offering primary frequency control

Abstract The provision of ancillary services is an additional revenue stream for the owners of inverter-equipped storage systems, such as batteries and electric vehicles. As real demonstrations have shown, primary frequency control (PFC) is a suitable and economically viable service for small-scale energy storage (ES) systems. This paper proposes a decentralized stochastic control policy, which significantly reduces ES units’ losses when providing PFC. The proposed controller can be tuned to obtain the desired service reserve provision errors, while achieving a balance between tracking accuracy and efficiency. An extension of the algorithm significantly reduces the switching rate of the devices by up to 95%. Analytical expressions for the reserve errors and the switching rates, dependent on the aggregation size and the controllers’ settings, are derived and verified by simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed controller can significantly reduce ES units’ losses when they are providing PFC by 8–15.5%, while achieving the expected tracking performance.