Effects of Flexible Ramping Product on Improving Power System Real-Time Operation

Integration of renewable energies in generation sector of power systems has caused many new issues for planners and decision makers. Therefore, new concepts such as flexibility are introduced to properly cover these problems. In this paper, a recently announced short-term flexibility product, namely, "Flexible ramping product" (FRP) in power markets is put under investigation from different aspects. FRP is the capacity reserved to meet next upcoming five-minute net load (load minus intermittent supply) uncertainty. Therefore, at first, the mathematical model of real-time dispatch (RTD) problem in presence of the FRP is formulated. Modeling this problem as a linear programming (LP) optimization problem, it is shown how the price of FRP and energy cost can be extracted for different scenarios. The effectiveness of presented algorithm for RTD problem is examined on different test systems. Based on the results, it is discussed that how the presence of FRP can reduce overall costs and price spikes as well as decreasing load and wind curtailment levels.