Romania is testing whether thousands of backup batteries installed at telecommunications sites can be transformed from emergency infrastructure into a distributed virtual power plant capable of generating revenue in electricity flexibility markets.
Huawei Romania, Bamboo Energy and Flexumers are developing a system that aggregates batteries used to protect telecom infrastructure and makes their combined capacity available to balancing and ancillary-services markets. Huawei provides the battery technology, Bamboo Energy supplies the optimisation platform, while Flexumers provides access to Romania’s balancing markets.
The key feature of the project, however, is not the battery technology itself. The batteries already exist. Telecommunications operators have installed them to maintain network services when grid electricity is interrupted, but for most of their operating lives the assets remain largely unused.
Turning that dormant capacity into a market resource could significantly change the economics. Rather than developing a dedicated battery-storage project, the virtual power plant can monetise infrastructure that was originally installed for another purpose.
The additional investment is therefore concentrated on communications, control systems, optimisation software, aggregation, market qualification and access to electricity markets. This potentially gives the model a different cost structure from conventional standalone battery projects.
For telecom operators, the primary resilience function remains intact while the same equipment can generate a second revenue stream. For the electricity system, the project adds another source of fast and distributed flexibility. For the aggregator, the opportunity lies in coordinating hundreds or potentially thousands of small assets that would have limited commercial value if operated individually.
Romania is becoming an increasingly relevant market for this approach as demand-side flexibility moves from a theoretical concept towards actual market participation. In September, Flexumers activated 3 MW of upward mFRR entirely through reductions in electricity consumption, demonstrating that non-generation resources can already provide balancing services to the Romanian power system.
The telecom battery project extends that model in a different direction. Instead of aggregating flexible industrial consumption, it brings together distributed batteries originally designed for emergency backup.
That distinction is important because telecommunications networks typically consist of a large number of geographically dispersed installations. Individually, these batteries may provide only limited flexibility, but software can coordinate them and make the portfolio operate as a single virtual power plant.
If 1,000 sites each provided only a relatively small amount of usable flexibility, their combined capacity could become significant for balancing markets. The commercial value therefore lies in orchestration rather than in the individual battery.
An aggregator needs to know the available capacity at every site, the state of charge of each battery, expected telecom requirements, equipment limitations and current market conditions. It must also ensure that electricity-market participation never compromises the primary purpose of the batteries.
A telecom operator cannot discharge its backup system to capture a market opportunity and then discover that insufficient reserve capacity remains when a grid outage occurs. Resilience requirements must therefore take priority over trading revenue.
Battery degradation is another important factor. Additional charging and discharging cycles increase equipment wear, meaning market revenues must be sufficient to cover incremental degradation costs and compensate asset owners for operational risks.
Whether those economics remain attractive at scale will determine how widely the model can be deployed.
If successful, the concept could extend well beyond telecommunications. Data centres, hospitals, commercial buildings, logistics facilities and industrial sites often maintain UPS systems and backup batteries primarily for resilience. Much of that capacity remains idle for long periods, creating a potential pool of flexibility that could be aggregated and offered to electricity markets.
The resulting virtual power plant would differ substantially from a conventional generating facility. There may be no single physical plant, development site or dedicated grid connection. Instead, the asset would be the portfolio itself: hundreds of batteries, communication networks, control systems, algorithms and commercial contracts operating through a common platform.
This shifts part of the value chain towards software, optimisation and market access. Technology providers can optimise assets they do not own, aggregators can build portfolios without financing all of the underlying hardware, and infrastructure owners can generate additional income without becoming electricity-market specialists themselves.
For Romania, wider participation by distributed batteries could also increase competition in balancing markets. As more flexible resources enter the market, conventional generators would face competition from industrial demand, backup infrastructure and other distributed assets.
Over time, that could help reduce the cost of balancing a power system with an increasing share of variable renewable generation.
The model nevertheless faces several challenges. Cybersecurity, communications reliability, metering, reserve qualification and battery availability become critical when thousands of distributed assets are remotely controlled. These requirements must also be coordinated with the resilience obligations of telecom operators.
The project nevertheless illustrates a broader shift taking place across electricity markets. The next major source of flexibility may not always require another power plant or a new standalone battery facility.
It may already be installed inside infrastructure built for an entirely different purpose.
Romania’s telecom virtual power plant is therefore testing whether the electricity market can identify dormant flexibility, aggregate it at scale and turn equipment that normally waits for emergencies into a recurring source of revenue.
