Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources for Provision of Ancillary Services: Architectures and Algorithms

We discuss the utilization of distributed energy resources (DERs) to provide active and reactive power support for ancillary services. Though the amount of active and/or reactive power provided individually by each of these resources can be very small, their presence in large numbers in power distribution networks implies that, under proper coordination mechanisms, they can collectively provide substantial active and reactive power regulation capacity. In this article, we provide a simple formulation of the DER coordination problem for enabling their utilization to provide ancillary services. We also provide specific architectures and algorithmic solutions to solve the DER coordination problem, with focus on decentralized solutions.