Conventional Power Plants to TSO Frequency Containment Reserves - A Competitive Analysis for Virtual Power Plant's Role

Frequency regulation is one of the basic objectives in ancillary market, which involves different stages and multiple participants. There exists different techniques for this service, where the points of demarcation are the time of service, and the regulatory requirements. The paper discusses primary frequency regulation, w.r.t Italian regulations, which is provided by conventional power plants upon TSO requests. The paper demonstrates conventional technique with its limitations, and proposes use of Virtual Power Plant (VPP) for the service provision. Storage and renewables techniques are compared under VPP context, and the use of storage is motivated. Finally, technical and economic comparison amongst potential storage techniques is done.