Network Reconfiguration Impact on Renewable Energy System and Energy Storage System in Day-Ahead Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how network reconfiguration can improve day-ahead scheduling for renewable energy and energy storage systems by reducing costs and curtailments through enhanced transmission flexibility.

Contribution

It introduces the use of network reconfiguration as a proactive and reactive tool in stochastic security-constrained unit commitment to better manage congestion involving RES and ESS.

Findings

Network reconfiguration reduces total system costs.

NR decreases RES curtailments.

NR improves ESS utilization and alleviates congestion.

Abstract

Renewable energy sources (RES) has gained significant interest in recent years. However, due to favourable weather conditions, the RES is installed in remote locations with limited transmission capacity. As a result, it can lead to major curtailments of the free resource when the network is congested. Therefore, energy storage system (ESS) is considered as a viable solution to store energy and address the intermittent nature of RES though ESS is often distributed and may not be geographically close to RES. Therefore, ESS may also suffer from limited transmission capacity due to network congestion. Currently, grid operators overlook network flexibility as a congestion management tool in day-ahead scheduling. This paper addresses these issues and studies the benefits of introducing network reconfiguration (NR) as a preventive and corrective action for transmission flexibility in day-ahead stochastic security-constrained unit-commitment (SSCUC-PC) while considering a multi-scenario RES output. Simulation results demonstrate that NR can lower total system cost, reduce RES curtailments and utilize ESS for better impact by alleviating network congestion in both base-case and post-contingency networks.