Unlocking the Potential of Flexible Energy Resources to Help Balance the Power Grid
For grid operators and energy aggregators, this work provides a method to increase the balancing capacity of flexible resources, though it is an incremental improvement over existing coordination approaches.
This paper addresses the challenge of efficiently exploiting flexible energy resources for grid balancing by coordinating multiple resources with complementary physical properties. Using robust optimization, they compute optimal control policies that account for ramp-rate constraints and market timescales, showing that coordinated aggregations can offer significantly more regulation capacity than individual resources.
Flexible energy resources can help balance the power grid by providing different types of ancillary services. However, the balancing potential of most types of resources is restricted by physical constraints such as the size of their energy buffer, limits on power-ramp rates, or control delays. Using the example of Secondary Frequency Regulation, this paper shows how the flexibility of various resources can be exploited more efficiently by considering multiple resources with complementary physical properties and controlling them in a coordinated way. To this end, optimal adjustable control policies are computed based on robust optimization. Our problem formulation takes into account power ramp-rate constraints explicitly, and accurately models the different timescales and lead times of the energy and reserve markets. Simulations demonstrate that aggregations of select resources can offer significantly more regulation capacity than the resources could provide individually.