Technical Characteristics and Market Design Aspects of Flexibility Service Provisions in Smart Grids

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Since electric power production and its consumption occurs concurrently, a mismatch between them can result in reliability concerns for power system operators. The increasing penetration of highly variable and intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) and uncertain loading patterns from increasing penetration of electric vehicles, necessitates more flexibility provisions in the power system. This is indeed because the supply and demand mismatch uncertainty has increased significantly, can occur instantaneously, and this requires the power grid to be able to react to such sudden fluctuations and accommodate new operating states within an acceptable time-frame and cost. Flexibility is the ability of a system to adopt an alternate course of action from a given state, within an acceptable cost threshold and time window, to respond to a range of uncertain future states. While in the traditional power grids, flexibility has mainly been provided by controllable generating units, in the paradigm of smart grids, a bidirectional flexibility provision is possible from various distributed energy resources (DERs) at the demand side. Hence, the notion of flexibility has been receiving attention in recent years. The present research will carry out comprehensive studies to understand the technical characteristics of flexibility service provisions and the future system needs of flexibility services, and the market design of flexibility services both at the wholesale and retail level. The main research objectives of this project are to undertake a comprehensive review to quantify flexibility service market design both those currently in use and those being considered by independent system operators (ISOs) to address future needs; drawing on experiences from various markets to provide key insights. To investigate the technical characteristics of various flexibility resources at the wholesale and retail levels for participation in ISO operated ancillary service markets or Local Distribution Company (LDC) operated retail markets. These provisions will include energy storage systems (ESS), demand response (DR), smart loads, electric vehicles, etc. To investigate short-term market designs to incentivize the flexibility service providers, which is necessary to compliment the increasing penetration of RES. To focus on intra-day and balancing markets from a market point of view with particular focus on incentives for market participants, including those connected to the DSO grids. And finally, to propose novel frameworks for aggregators in smart grids for optimal integration of DERs to improve the system flexibly and security, while not affecting customer's comfort preferences. The research will examine the requirements of flexibility and security at nodal level, determine the availability of DERs for flexibility services, and simultaneously determine the aggregators' provisions.