The adoption of electric vehicles is incentivized by governments around the world to decarbonize the mobility sector. Simultaneously, the continuously increasing amount of renewable energy sources and electric devices such as heat pumps and electric vehicles leads to congested grids. To meet this challenge, several forms of flexibility markets are currently being researched. So far, no analysis has calculated the actual flexibility potential of electric vehicles with different operating strategies, electricity tariffs and charging power levels while taking into account realistic user behavior. Therefore, this paper presents a detailed case study of the flexibility potential of electric vehicles for fixed and dynamic prices, for three charging power levels in consideration of Californian and German user behavior. The model developed uses vehicle and mobility data that is publicly available from field trials in the USA and Germany, cost-optimizes the charging process of the vehicles, and then calculates the flexibility of each electric vehicle for every 15 min. The results show that positive flexibility is mostly available during either the evening or early morning hours. Negative flexibility follows the periodic vehicle availability at home if the user chooses to charge the vehicle as late as possible. Increased charging power levels lead to increased amounts of flexibility. Future research will focus on the integration of stochastic forecasts for vehicle availability and electricity tariffs.

With the increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy generation, there is a growing demand to use the inherent flexibility within buildings to absorb renewable related disruptions. Heat pumps play a particularly important role, as they account for a high share of electricity consumption in residential units. The most common way of quantifying the flexibility is by considering the response of the building or the household appliances to external penalty signals. However, this approach neither accounts for the use cases of flexibility trading nor considers its impact on the prosumer comfort, when the heat pump should cover the stochastic domestic hot water (DHW) consumption. Therefore, in this paper, a new approach to quantifying the flexibility potential of residential heat pumps is proposed. This methodology enables the prosumers themselves to generate and submit the operating plan of the heat pump to the system operator and trade the alternative operating plans of the heat pump on the flexibility market. In addition, the impact of the flexibility provision on the prosumer comfort is investigated by calculating the warm water temperature drops in the thermal energy storage given heat demand forecast errors. The results show that the approach with constant capacity reservation in the thermal energy storage provides the best solution, with an average of 2.5 min unsatisfactory time per day and a maximum temperature drop of 2.3 °C.

Increasing integration of renewables can cause congestion and power grid instability. Recent congestion management studies have shown the possibilities to offer flexibility with distributed energy resources (DERs) and the need for flexibility market platforms. This paper presents a flexibility model for a combination of photovoltaics and battery storage system. This model takes different forecast data as inputs and performs an optimization to obtain a cost optimal operational plan. Any deviation that a DER could offer from this optimal plan is considered as its flexibility potential. The model outputs a list of flexibility offers. In addition, this paper details the different possibilities of offering positive and negative flexibility with a novel offer pricing strategy. The model reoptimizes itself to a new optimal operation plan once a desired flexibility bid is chosen. Two case studies are discussed in this paper to substantiate the successful implementation.

Stability of the electricity grid is highly dependent on the grid frequency which is presently controlled by applying balancing power from large power plants and pumped-storage facilities. Due to the increasing percentage of renewable energy, the capacity of available balancing power becomes insufficient and an alternative needs to be proposed. In the recent years, there has been a growing interest shown to offer flexibility from the household facilities to solve the stability problems in the grid. However, there is still uncertainty in defining the flexibility offers and pricing for a flexibility market. To meet this research gap, this paper presents a novel approach to quantify the flexibility potential and calculate flexibility offers for heat pump and combined heat and power unit. The results are summarized in a unique format, which can be directly used for trading in the flexibility platform.