EAGER: Renewables: Selling Demand Flexibility in The Future Electricity Grid

未来的电网将大量使用可再生能源发电。这一代是多变的，是断断续续的，不可预测的，不可控的。使用传统的发电方式来支持这种可变性会抵消可再生能源的排放优势，而且成本非常昂贵。因此，未来的电网必须转向需求灵活性，这将在缓解可再生能源的可变性方面发挥关键作用。消费者将从被动的电力接受者转变为提供服务以平衡供需的积极参与者。本项目旨在探索需求灵活性所能提供的各种平衡服务的业务案例、市场机制和定价。这些服务包括在零售分销层面平衡供需，以及在批发传输层面减少线路拥堵。这项工作的广泛议程是通过发展和理解潜在的经济研究问题来支持可再生能源发电的深入渗透。未来将有分布式负载、发电和存储的地理集群。负载服务实体（LSE）表示与网格的事务中的集群。伦敦证券交易所以一小时为单位从输电网购买大量电力。在更精细的时间尺度上，大部分的功率平衡可以通过在集群内调制存储和灵活负载来实现。这减少了对昂贵和肮脏的储备发电的依赖。我们探索适当的市场工具，如期权和远期合约，以支持利用需求灵活性来平衡。这些工具允许提前时间来组织灵活的负载，并考虑到其可用性的随机性。我们将在不同的市场模型下研究这些工具的均衡和价格发现。集群的多余灵活性或存储容量也可以出售给其他集群。集群之间的双边安排可能很笨拙。一个更好的替代方案是集群将其可用的灵活性提交给系统操作员（SO）。组织进行多期经济调度，使社会（燃料）成本最小化。它确定了最优发电计划和需求灵活性设定点。我们在这里的价值主张是，存储和灵活性可以减少传输网络的拥塞。在这种情况下，我们将量化需求灵活性的系统效益，并探索参与负荷所需的激励方案，以及实现这些效益所需的跨巴士协调和控制程度。

The future electricity grid will have significant renewable generation. This generation is variable it is intermittent, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Using conventional generation to back-up this variability defeats the emissions benefits of renewables and is very expensive. So the future grid must turn to demand flexibility which will play a critical role to mitigate renewable variability. Consumers will be transformed from passive recipients of power to active participants in providing services to balance supply and demand. This project seeks to explore business cases, market mechanisms, and pricing for various balancing services that demand flexibility can provide. These services include balancing supply and demand as the retail distribution level, and reducing congestion on lines at the wholesale transmission level. The broad agenda of this work is to support the deep penetration of renewable generation by developing and understanding the underlying economic research issues.The future will have geographic clusters of distributed loads, generation, and storage. A load serving entity (LSE) represents the cluster in transactions with the grid. The LSE buys bulk power from the transmission grid in one hour blocks. At finer time scales, most of the power balance can be arranged internally by modulating storage and flexible loads within the cluster. This reduces the reliance on expensive and dirty reserve generation. We explore appropriate market instruments such as options and forward contracts that support harnessing demand flexibility for balancing. These instruments allow for the lead-time to organize flexible loads, and account for the randomness in their availability.We will study equilibria and price discovery for these instruments under various market models. Excess flexibility or storage capacity from a cluster can also be sold to other clusters. Bilateral arrangements between clusters can be clumsy. A better alternative is for clusters to submit their available flexibility to the system operator (SO). The SO conducts multi-period economic dispatch to minimize the social (fuel) cost. It determines optimal generation schedules and demand flexibility set points. Our value proposition here is that storage and flexibility can reduce congestion in transmission networks. We will quantify the system benefit of demand flexibility in this context, and explore incentive schemes necessary for load participation, as well as the degree of coordination and control across buses necessary to realize these benefits.