A bottom-up approach to leverage the participation of residential aggregators in reserve services markets

The increase of demand side participation in reserve service (RS) requires the extension of the markets’ activity to the millions of consumers present in the residential sector. This paper proposes a method that performs a bottom-up aggregation of residential demand-side flexibility associated with domestic appliances, namely Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCL). The flexibility profiles provided by each residential consumer are transformed into aggregated reserve bids to be offered in the day ahead tertiary reserve markets. A case study involving 1500 end-users associated with an aggregator bidding in the Portuguese tertiary reserve market will be used to illustrate the method.