Investigation of Ontario's Electricity Market Behaviour and Energy Storage Scheduling in the Market Based on Model Predictive Control

In this paper, comprehensive studies are conducted over Ontario's electricity market data in the past decade. It is indicated that the increase in renewable energy penetration into the market has altered the overall behaviour of the energy market, with negative electricity prices even starting to appear. As a result, deployment of large-scale storage units in the market is considered to address the negative price issues. A compressed-air storage unit is selected and modeled as a large-scale storage option for numerical studies. An optimization-based algorithm based on model predictive control is proposed for optimal scheduling of storage. Real-world data adopted from Ontario's market are used for numerical studies. The storage arbitrage profit in the market is computed and analyzed. It is concluded that storage arbitrage profit significantly increases using model predictive control as compared to a self-scheduling approach, thereby storage becomes more profitable.