Huawei Romania, Bamboo Energy and Flexumers are developing a system that aggregates backup batteries at telecommunications sites and makes their combined capacity available to balancing and ancillary-services markets. The project is focused on how the aggregated capacity is used in electricity-market services rather than on the batteries as standalone assets.
The model 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, with dispatch decisions linked to grid needs.
Telecom-owned batteries and market participation
Telecommunications operators already own the backup batteries used in the approach. The batteries are installed to maintain service if grid electricity fails, but for most of their operating life they remain underused.
Rather than building a dedicated power-storage facility, the virtual-power-plant operator monetises existing infrastructure designed for resilience. 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 electricity system receives an additional source of fast flexibility through coordinated battery operation.
The aggregator’s role is to coordinate hundreds or potentially thousands of small assets that would be commercially insignificant if operated individually. This requires portfolio-level control rather than site-by-site trading by each asset owner.
Flexumers’ mFRR activation and system requirements
Romania is described as an increasingly credible location for the model because demand-side flexibility has already been demonstrated. In September, Flexumers activated 3 MW of upward mFRR entirely through reductions in electricity consumption, providing balancing services to the national system.
The telecom project extends that concept by aggregating distributed batteries originally designed for backup power rather than flexible consumption from factories. The geographic dispersion of telecom installations across much of the country is presented as a key difference for how flexibility could be assembled.
Telecom networks typically include large numbers of relatively small installations, creating a naturally distributed flexibility portfolio. Software can make these dispersed assets behave like a single plant for market participation.
If 1,000 individual sites each offered only a small amount of usable flexibility, their combined capacity could become material for balancing markets. The operational emphasis is on orchestration across locations and constraints.
Constraints, degradation and qualification
An aggregator must determine how much capacity is available at each location, including battery state of charge, expected telecom requirements, equipment limitations and market prices. The system also has to preserve the batteries’ primary purpose as emergency backup equipment.
A telecom operator cannot empty its backup batteries to capture an electricity-market opportunity and then find that insufficient emergency capacity remains during a grid outage. Optimisation therefore places resilience constraints above trading revenue when scheduling battery charging and discharging.
Battery degradation is another commercial variable affecting whether participation scales. Additional cycling creates wear, so market income must exceed incremental degradation cost and compensate the asset owner for operational risk.
Beyond telecommunications: other backup assets
If the economics work, the opportunity extends beyond telecom infrastructure into other sites that maintain UPS systems or backup batteries primarily for resilience. Data centres, hospitals, commercial buildings, logistics facilities and industrial plants are cited as examples where such equipment can spend most of its life waiting for an outage.
Aggregation could convert part of that dormant capacity into a power-market resource through coordinated operation. In this setup, 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, communications links, algorithms and contracts managed through a common platform. This structure shifts value toward software development and market access rather than financing a single hardware installation.
Market competition and remote-control risks
The model includes roles where technology companies optimise assets they do not own, aggregators build portfolios without financing underlying hardware, and infrastructure owners earn additional income without becoming electricity traders. For Romania specifically, it could increase balancing-market competition as more distributed resources participate.
As distributed resources join balancing markets, conventional generators would face competition from industrial demand, backup infrastructure and other flexible loads. That change may affect the cost of balancing an electricity system that contains increasing amounts of variable renewable generation.
The opportunity is described as not risk-free once thousands of distributed batteries are remotely controlled. Cybersecurity, communications reliability, metering, reserve qualification and coordination with telecom resilience requirements are identified as critical considerations .
Romania’s telecom VPP testing
Romania’s telecom VPP is testing whether the electricity market can identify dormant flexibility from existing backup equipment and aggregate it into a recurring revenue asset . The focus remains on turning equipment normally used for emergencies into capacity that can be scheduled for balancing services while maintaining resilience functions.
