Romania is testing whether thousands of telecom backup batteries can be transformed from idle emergency equipment into a distributed virtual power plant that earns revenue from electricity-market flexibility. The project focuses on aggregating the combined capacity of batteries already installed at telecommunications sites. The system is designed to make that capacity available to balancing and ancillary-services markets.
Huawei Romania, Bamboo Energy and Flexumers are developing a platform that aggregates backup batteries at telecommunications locations and provides their combined output to Romanian balancing and ancillary-services markets. The model combines Huawei battery technology, Bamboo Energy optimisation software and Flexumers’ access to balancing markets. Charging and discharging are controlled according to electricity-system requirements.
How the telecom battery portfolio is used in balancing markets
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 how the equipment can be monetised.
Rather than building a dedicated power-storage facility, the virtual-power-plant operator monetises infrastructure that already exists for another purpose. Incremental investment is directed to communications, control software, aggregation, qualification and market access. The telecom operator retains the resilience function it originally paid for while opening a second revenue stream from the same equipment.
The approach also adds fast flexibility for the electricity system by coordinating hundreds or potentially thousands of small assets. An aggregator earns by pooling distributed resources that would be commercially insignificant if operated individually. For Romania, the model is supported by existing evidence that demand-side flexibility can provide balancing services.
In September, Flexumers activated 3 MW of upward mFRR entirely through reductions in electricity consumption. The demonstration showed that resources without conventional generation can provide balancing services to the national system. The telecom project extends this concept by aggregating distributed batteries rather than flexible consumption.
Constraints, degradation and scaling requirements
Instead of aggregating flexible factory consumption, the system aggregates distributed batteries originally designed for backup power. The geographic dispersion matters because telecom installations can be spread across much of Romania. Telecom networks typically include large numbers of relatively small sites, creating a naturally distributed flexibility portfolio that software can coordinate as a single plant.
If 1,000 individual sites each offered only a small amount of usable flexibility, their combined capacity could become material for balancing markets. The system requires orchestration inputs including available capacity at each location, battery state of charge, expected telecom requirements, equipment limitations and market prices. Optimisation also has to preserve the batteries’ primary purpose.
A telecom operator cannot empty its backup batteries to capture 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 treated as a commercial variable because additional cycling creates wear.
Market income has to exceed incremental degradation costs and compensate the asset owner for operational risk. These calculations are described as determining whether the model scales beyond initial deployments. If the economics work, the opportunity extends beyond telecommunications.
Potential expansion beyond telecom infrastructure
The source describes other sectors that frequently maintain UPS systems or backup batteries primarily for resilience, including data centres, hospitals, commercial buildings, logistics facilities and industrial plants. Many such assets spend most of their lives waiting for an outage. Aggregation could convert part of that 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 transmission connection. Instead, the asset is described as the portfolio itself: hundreds of batteries along with communications links, algorithms and contracts managed through a common platform. This shifts value towards software and market access.
The model also involves different roles for market participants: technology companies can optimise assets they do not own; aggregators can build portfolios without financing underlying hardware; and infrastructure owners can earn additional income without becoming electricity traders. For Romania specifically, participation by more distributed resources could increase competition in balancing markets.
As more distributed resources participate, conventional generators would face competition from industrial demand, backup infrastructure and other flexible loads. The source links this development to potential effects on balancing costs in an electricity system with increasing variable renewable generation. It also notes that the opportunity is not risk-free once thousands of distributed batteries are remotely controlled.
Key operational requirements include cybersecurity, communications reliability, metering, reserve qualification and coordination with telecom resilience requirements. The project is described as demonstrating a broader shift already beginning across electricity markets: large sources of flexibility may not require construction of another power plant if flexibility already exists inside other infrastructure.
Romania’s telecom VPP testing focuses on whether the electricity market can identify dormant flexibility, aggregate it and turn equipment that normally waits for emergencies into a recurring revenue asset.