Romania is testing whether thousands of telecom backup batteries can be transformed into a distributed virtual power plant that earns revenue from electricity-market flexibility. The project focuses on making combined battery capacity available to balancing and ancillary-services markets. It is designed to use market participation while preserving the batteries’ emergency role.
Huawei Romania, Bamboo Energy and Flexumers are developing a system that aggregates backup batteries at telecommunications sites. Their approach links Huawei battery technology, Bamboo Energy optimisation software and Flexumers’ access to Romanian balancing markets. Charging and discharging are controlled according to electricity-system requirements.
The project’s key element is not the batteries themselves, which are already owned by telecommunications operators. Backup batteries are installed to maintain service if grid electricity fails, but for most of their operating life they remain underused. Turning that capacity into a market asset changes the economics for the infrastructure owner.
Rather than building a dedicated power-storage facility, the virtual-power-plant operator monetises existing infrastructure used for resilience. Incremental investment is directed to communications, control software, aggregation, qualification and market access. This structure can result in a different cost profile compared with conventional standalone battery projects.
The telecom operator retains the resilience function it originally paid for while adding a second revenue stream from the same equipment. The electricity system gains another source of fast flexibility through coordinated battery operation. The aggregator’s role involves coordinating hundreds or potentially thousands of small assets that would be commercially insignificant individually.
Balancing-market participation and operational constraints
Romania is described as an increasingly credible location for the model because demand-side flexibility has already been used in balancing services. In September, Flexumers activated 3 MW of upward mFRR entirely through reductions in electricity consumption. The activation demonstrated that resources without conventional generation can provide balancing services to the national system.
The telecom project extends this concept by aggregating distributed batteries originally designed for backup power instead of flexible factory consumption. The geographic dispersion of telecom sites across much of the country is central to the portfolio design. Telecom networks typically include large numbers of relatively small installations, creating a distributed flexibility base that software can combine into one plant.
If 1,000 individual sites each offered usable flexibility, their combined capacity could become material for balancing markets. An aggregator must determine how much capacity is available at each location and account for state of charge, expected telecom requirements, equipment limitations and market prices. The system also has to preserve the batteries’ primary purpose during operation.
A telecom operator cannot empty backup batteries to pursue an electricity-market opportunity and then find insufficient emergency capacity during a grid outage. Optimisation therefore places resilience constraints above trading revenue. Battery degradation is also included as a commercial variable because additional cycling creates wear.
Market income must exceed incremental degradation costs and compensate the asset owner for operational risk. These calculations determine whether the model scales beyond pilot activity. If the economics work, the approach could extend beyond telecommunications to other resilience-focused infrastructure.
Potential expansion beyond telecom sites
Data centres, hospitals, commercial buildings, logistics facilities and industrial plants frequently maintain UPS systems or backup batteries primarily for resilience. Many such assets spend most of their lives waiting for an outage rather than providing active services. Aggregation could convert part of this dormant capacity into a power-market resource.
The resulting virtual power plant would differ from a conventional generating station because there may be no single physical plant or development site or transmission connection. Instead, the asset is the portfolio itself, comprising hundreds of batteries along with communications links, algorithms and contracts managed through a common platform. This shifts value toward software and market access rather than hardware ownership.
The model also allows technology companies to optimise assets they do not own and enables aggregators to build portfolios without financing underlying hardware. Infrastructure owners could earn additional income without becoming electricity traders. For Romania’s balancing markets, increased participation by distributed resources could change competitive dynamics for conventional generators.
As more distributed resources participate, conventional generators would face competition from industrial demand, backup infrastructure and other flexible loads. This could affect balancing costs in an electricity system with increasing amounts of variable renewable generation. The opportunity is described as dependent on meeting technical and operational requirements once thousands of distributed batteries are remotely controlled.
Cybersecurity, communications reliability, metering, reserve qualification and coordination with telecom resilience requirements are identified as critical elements. The project is also positioned as part of a broader shift across electricity markets toward using existing infrastructure rather than constructing new power plants in every case.
Romania’s telecom VPP testing focuses on whether the electricity market can identify dormant flexibility, aggregate it and turn equipment normally used for emergencies into a recurring revenue asset through market participation.