Day-ahead Operational Planning with Enhanced Flexible Ramping Product: Design and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper proposes an enhanced flexible ramping product design for day-ahead markets to better accommodate renewable resource variability, improving operational flexibility, market efficiency, and reliability in power systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel flexible ramping product design and market payment policy that adapt to real-time conditions and can be integrated with minimal disruption into existing market models.

Findings

Enhanced FRP improves adaptability to real-time conditions.

Validation shows better operational flexibility and market efficiency.

Method tested successfully on IEEE 118-bus system.

Abstract

New resource mix, e.g., renewable resources, are imposing operational complexities to modern power systems by intensifying uncertainty and variability in the system net load. This issue has motivated independent system operators (ISOs), e.g., California ISO (CAISO), to add the flexible ramping product (FRP) to their day-ahead (DA) market models. Such structural changes in the DA market formulation require further analyses and detailed design to ensure adequate operational flexibility, market efficiency, and reliability. This paper conducts a comprehensive study to: (a) augment existing DA market models with enhanced FRP design in order to schedule ramp capabilities that are more adaptive with respect to the real-time (RT) condition, and (b) design corresponding market payment policies that accurately reflect the value of the added flexibility through enhanced FRP design. The proposed FRP design can be implemented in present-day system operations with minimal disruption to existing DA market models. Performance of the proposed DA market model, which includes the enhanced FRP design, is compared against the DA market model with existing FRP design through a validation methodology based on RT unit commitment model. This validation methodology mimics fifteen-minute market of CAISO. The proposed method is tested on an IEEE 118-bus test system.