Romania is testing whether thousands of telecom backup batteries can be transformed from idle emergency equipment into a distributed virtual power plant. The project aims to generate revenue from electricity-market flexibility by making combined capacity available to balancing and ancillary-services markets. The initiative is being developed by Huawei Romania, Bamboo Energy and Flexumers.
The system aggregates backup batteries at telecommunications sites and routes their combined output to balancing and ancillary-services markets. It combines Huawei’s battery technology, Bamboo Energy’s optimisation software and Flexumers’ access to Romanian balancing markets. Charging and discharging are controlled according to electricity-system requirements.
How the telecom battery aggregation model is designed
The project focuses on monetising existing infrastructure rather than building a dedicated storage facility. Telecommunications operators already own the batteries, which are installed to maintain service if grid electricity fails. For most of their operating life, the batteries remain underused.
Incremental investment is described as concentrated in 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 electricity system gains an additional source of fast flexibility through coordinated battery operation.
The aggregator’s role includes coordinating hundreds or potentially thousands of small assets that would be commercially insignificant if operated individually. The approach relies on orchestration across distributed sites rather than a single physical installation. The model is designed so software can make dispersed batteries behave like one plant.
Balancing-market participation and operational constraints
In September, Flexumers activated 3 MW of upward mFRR through reductions in electricity consumption. That activation was used to demonstrate that resources without conventional generation can provide balancing services to the national system.
The telecom project extends that concept by aggregating distributed batteries originally designed for backup power instead of aggregating flexible factory consumption. The assets could be geographically dispersed across much of the country because telecom networks include large numbers of relatively small installations. 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, including the battery’s state of charge, expected telecom requirements, equipment limitations and market prices. The system also needs to preserve the battery’s primary purpose during market participation. A telecom operator cannot empty backup batteries for trading 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 must exceed incremental degradation cost and compensate the asset owner for operational risk, with those calculations determining whether the model scales.
Potential scope beyond telecommunications and key risks
If the economics work, the opportunity extends beyond telecom sites to other infrastructure that maintains UPS systems or backup batteries primarily for resilience. Data centres, hospitals, commercial buildings, logistics facilities and industrial plants are described as examples where such equipment often spends most of its life waiting for an outage.
The resulting virtual power plant would differ from a conventional generating station because there may be no single physical plant, development site or transmission connection. Instead, the asset is described as the portfolio itself: hundreds of batteries plus communications links, algorithms and contracts managed through a common platform. This shifts value toward software and market access.
The project also highlights that cybersecurity, communications reliability, metering, reserve qualification and coordination with telecom resilience requirements become critical once thousands of distributed batteries are remotely controlled. For Romania specifically, the initiative is described as testing whether the electricity market can identify dormant flexibility, aggregate it and turn emergency equipment into a recurring revenue asset.