Weather-Driven Flexibility Reserve Procurement

Abstract

The growing penetration of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) requires additional flexibility reserve to cope with the uncertainty in power system operation. Current industrial practice typically assumes a certain fraction of the VRES production forecast power as flexibility reserve, even though the VRES variability and uncertainty is a function of weather conditions. Therefore, this paper focuses on weather-driven flexibility reserve sizing and allocation for large-scale wind power installations. First, we propose a method, which generates statistically credible wind power forecast errors based on forecasts of various weather features, thus stressing a given wind power forecast. Then, these errors are mapped into a risk-based reserve requirement, which is then compared with the current extent-based and probability-based requirements. Additionally, the risk-, extent-, and probability-based reserve requirements are allocated to compare their cost and deliverability performance. Throughout the paper, we use real-world data to compute weather-driven flexibility reserve requirements and evaluate their performance using numerical experiments on a 1819-bus NYISO system model with both on- and off-shore wind power installations.