Decentralized and discretized control for storage systems offering primary frequency control

The provision of ancillary services is an additional revenue stream for the owners of inverter-equipped storagesystems, 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 paperproposes a decentralized stochastic control policy, which significantly reduces ES units’ losses when providingPFC. The proposed controller can be tuned to obtain the desired service reserve provision errors, while achievinga balance between tracking accuracy and efficiency. An extension of the algorithm significantly reduces theswitching 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 areproviding PFC by 8–15.5%, while achieving the expected tracking pe