Understanding Risk and Revenue in the Nordic 15-minute mFRR market: An EV Aggregation Study

TL;DR

This study analyzes the profitability and risk management of aggregated EV fleets participating in the Nordic 15-minute mFRR market, demonstrating that co-optimisation strategies enhance expected profits and reduce downside risks.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic optimisation model for EV fleet participation in short-term flexibility markets, incorporating risk-awareness and co-optimisation for improved revenue and risk mitigation.

Findings

Co-optimisation increases expected profit across price scenarios.

The approach reduces downside risk and reliance on unwinding positions.

Higher revenues from mFRR down contribute to profit uplift.

Abstract

Decarbonisation, decentralisation, and intermittency are driving the development of flexibility markets towards shorter market time units (MTU). Shorter MTUs and shorter gate closures lower the entrance barriers of demand side aggregators that face significant uncertainty on longer time scales. We study the business case for aggregated EV fleets participating in the Nordic 15-minute mFRR Energy Activation Market (EAM). Motivated by increasing system granularity and rapid EV uptake, we represent fleet flexibility as a virtual battery with time-varying power and energy envelopes and formulate a risk-aware stochastic optimisation that co-ordinates day-ahead scheduling with quarter-hour mFRR bidding. Using synthetic residential charging cohorts and observed day-ahead prices on two stylised days, we compare an independent day-ahead baseline to a co-optimised strategy under conservative availability and a CVaR-augmented objective. Across both price cases, co-optimisation increases expected profit and lowers downside risk: the model buys less energy day-ahead and shifts procurement toward mFRR down while flattening the charging plan to retain eligibility for mFRR up. Profit decomposition shows that the uplift is driven by higher mFRR down revenues and reduced reliance on unwinding day-ahead positions. We discuss operational implications for bidding and outline two extensions: rolling 45-minute re-optimisation and a V2G framework.