Providing Control Reserve with PV Systems – Goals and Results of the Research Project PV-Regel

Inhalt:
National and international climate objectives provide a massive expansion of clean energy resources in the upcoming decades. As a consequence, the increasing number of renewable energy systems and the decreasing number of conventional power plants lead to the inevitable step of taking over system responsibility for photovoltaics (PV). The research project PV-Regel addresses the system responsibility for PV by developing new concepts and by determining optimal market conditions for providing control reserve with PV systems. This challenge can be divided into two sections. On the one hand, there is the regulatory and market design perspective. Nowadays market conditions do not offer a suitable environment for the provision of control reserve with fluctuating energy sources. An economic participation is not possible because of weekly tendering processes as well as the resulting product time-slices and other market barriers in the German control reserve auction. On the other hand, it is necessary to focus on the technical aspects. First investigations show that PV systems with appropriate communication capabilities can easily be combined to virtual power plants and are very dynamic and precise in providing negative and positive control reserve even without additional energy storages.