Fault tolerant aggregation for power system services

Exploiting the flexibility in distributed energy resources (DER) is seen as an important contribution to allow high penetrations of renewable generation in electrical power systems. However, the present control infrastructure in power systems is not well suited for the integration of a very large number of small units. A common approach is to aggregate a portfolio of such units together and expose them to the power system as a single large virtual unit. In order to realize the vision of a Smart Grid, concepts for flexible, resilient and reliable aggregation infrastructures are required. This paper presents such a concept while focusing on the aspect of resilience and fault tolerance. The proposed concept makes use of a multi-level election algorithm to transparently manage the addition, removal, failure and reorganization of units. It has been implemented and tested as a proof-of-concept on the distributed smart grid test bed SYSLAB at the Technical University of Denmark.