Decentralized management of distributed energy resources for frequency support - Finnish pilot

Modern societies depend on reliable availability of electricity while the disruptors of green transition, namely decarbonisation and decentralisation, are introducing new challenges in power system management. Power flows are becoming bi-directional and power production is increasingly intermittent in nature. This calls for new methods in planning and operating power systems. One of the new approaches to power system management is decentralisation also in terms of decision making. This is also sometimes referred to as edge computing. This approach acknowledges the increasing amount of complexity and data that is needed to operate power systems efficiently by forming sub-systems that communicate with the main system but are optimized locally. The approach of decentralization is taken to the realm of frequency regulation in this paper. We present a concept that has been developed in the University of Grenoble, France, and now tested in Finland. The proposed solution depends less on centralized management and more on local situational awareness.