A Real-Life Demonstration of Secondary Frequency Reserve Provision with Electric Water Heaters

Louis Brouyaux (), Sandro Iacovella and Sylvain Quoilin ()
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Louis Brouyaux: Integrated & Sustainable Energy Systems, University of Liège, 7 Place du Vingt Août, 4000 Liège, Belgium
Sandro Iacovella: ThermoVault BV, 32/3A Diestsevest, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Sylvain Quoilin: Integrated & Sustainable Energy Systems, University of Liège, 7 Place du Vingt Août, 4000 Liège, Belgium

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 7, 1-17

Abstract: Residential electric water heaters have the potential to significantly contribute to the balancing of the grid by providing frequency services. However, this entails a large-scale, challenging control problem subject to several uncertainties. In this paper, we perform the first real-life validation of secondary frequency reserve provision with a cluster of residential thermal loads in a near-commercial setting. We adopt an aggregate-and-dispatch control approach, which combines a scalable optimization step enabled by a reduced-order model with a real-time dispatch step. To handle the uncertainty related to service activation, we incorporate chance constraints in the optimization model and reformulate it as a robust problem. We validate the control approach under the assumption of perfect merit order knowledge in different stages, with a cluster of up to 600 electric water heaters, and show that this pool is able to effectively provide reserves, and that the integration of the chance constraints is beneficial for performance.

Keywords: demand response; ancillary services; frequency control; water heating; virtual power plant; model predictive control; chance constraints; optimization; experimental validation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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