Abstract: The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources and the empowerment of consumers as a central and active solution to deal with the generation variability are paving the path towards local energy markets. The keynote is focused on the local smart electricity market where even small size consumers and prosumers can sell/buy the locally produced electrical energy or power to contribute to the balance of the power system. The local electricity market is managed by a commercial aggregator, organized as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), that gathers the energy/power flexibility offered from its consumers/prosumers portfolio.
In this new model, the provision of ancillary services to the Transmission System Operator (TSO) should take into account the possible flexibility furnished by new distributed resources, such as dispersed and small generators, also based on RES, and frequently endowed with small batteries. In particular, distributed Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs), also of small scale, that were mainly used to decrease the uncertainty due to RES and to increase the energy self-consumption for the end-user, can be also managed to provide energy flexibility to the TSO.

Biography: Pierluigi Siano received the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information and electrical engineering from the University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy, in 2001 and 2006, respectively.
He is a Professor and Scientific Director of the Smart Grids and Smart Cities Laboratory with the Department of Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno.
His research activities are centered on demand response, on energy management, on the integration of distributed energy resources in smart grids, on electricity markets and on planning and management of power systems.
In these research fields he has co-authored more than 500 articles including more than 300 international journal papers that received in Scopus more than 9700 citations with an H-index equal to 49.
In 2019 and 2020 he received the award as Highly cited Researcher by ISI Web of Science Group. He has been the Chair of the IES TC on Smart Grids.
He is Editor for the Power & Energy Society Section of IEEE Access, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, Open Journal of the IEEE IES, IET Smart Grid and IET Renewable Power Generation.