Distribution market as a ramping aggregator for grid flexibility support
For distribution system operators and bulk system operators, this work addresses the challenge of managing ramping flexibility from distributed resources, but the approach is incremental as it extends existing market concepts.
The paper proposes a distribution market scheduling model that aggregates distributed energy resources to provide ramping flexibility to the upstream grid. Numerical simulations on a distribution system with several microgrids demonstrate the model's effectiveness.
The growing proliferation of microgrids and distributed energy resources in distribution networks has resulted in the development of Distribution Market Operator (DMO). This new entity will facilitate the management of the distributed resources and their interactions with upstream network and the wholesale market. At the same time, DMOs can tap into the flexibility potential of these distributed resources to address many of the challenges that system operators are facing. This paper investigates this opportunity and develops a distribution market scheduling model based on upstream network ramping flexibility requirements. That is, the distribution network will play the role of a flexibility resource in the system, with a relatively large size and potential, to help bulk system operators to address emerging ramping concerns. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on when tested on a distribution system with several microgrids.