Comprehensive Overview of Power System Flexibility during the Scenario of High Penetration of Renewable Energy in Utility Grid

Increased deployment of variable renewable energy (VRE) has posed significant challenges to ensure reliable power system operations. As VRE penetration increases beyond 80%, the power system will require long duration energy storage and flexibility. Detailed uncertainty analysis, identifying challenges, and opportunities to provide sufficient flexibility will help to achieve smooth operations of power system networks during the scenario of high share of VRE sources. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of the power system flexibility (PSF). The intention of this review is to provide a wide spectrum of power system flexibility, PSF drivers, PSF resources, PSF provisions, methods used for assessment of flexibility and flexibility planning to the researchers, academicians, power system planners, and engineers working on the integration of VRE into the utility grid to achieve high share of these sources. More than 100 research papers on the basic concepts of PSF, drivers of the PSF, resources of PSF, requirement of the PSF, metrics used for assessment of the flexibility, methods and approaches used for measurement of flexibility level in network of the power system, and methods used for the PSF planning and flexibility provisions have been thoroughly reviewed and classified for quick reference considering different dimensions.

Investigating the Effect of Uncertainty Characteristics of Renewable Energy Resources on Power System Flexibility

This study investigates the effect of uncertainty characteristics of renewable energy resources on the flexibility of a power system. The more renewable energy resources introduced, the greater the imbalance between load and generation. Securing the flexibility of the system is becoming important to manage this situation. The degree of flexibility cannot be independent of the uncertainty of the power system. However, most existing studies on flexibility have not explicitly considered the effects of uncertainty characteristics. Therefore, this study proposes a method to quantitatively analyze the effect of uncertainty characteristics on power system flexibility. Here, the uncertainties of the power system indicate the net load forecast error, which can be represented as a probability distribution. Of the characteristics of the net load forecast error, skewness and kurtosis were considered. The net load forecast error was modeled with a Pearson distribution, which has been widely used to generate the probability density function with skewness and kurtosis. Scenarios for the forecast net load, skewness, and kurtosis were generated, and their effects on flexibility were evaluated. The simulation results for the scenarios based on a modified IEEE-RTS-96 revealed that skewness is more effective than kurtosis. The proposed method can help system operators to efficiently respond to changes in the uncertainty characteristics of renewable energy resources.

Impact of Renewable Energy Sources on Power System Flexibility Requirements

A power system can be defined as flexible if it can within economic and technological boundaries respond quickly and adequately to variations in supply and demand. The ongoing penetration of variable and intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) like wind and solar imposes additional and more critical requirement on power system flexibility. In this paper we propose a method to quantify these requirements based on the comparison of seven demand side parameters describing the statistical properties of the net load and the residual load of the referred power system. Each one of these parameters reflects a separate requirement on the available conventional generation in hourly and daily time scales—ramp up and ramp-down capabilities, technological minimum of generation, daily variation of generation. The proposed approach can be used to predict the requirements for generation flexibility according to the expected scenario of RES penetration in the future development of energy power system. It has been applied and integrated from the Bulgarian Transmission System Operator (TSO) which name is the Bulgarian Electricity System Operator (ESO).

Statistical processing of wind and solar PV generation variability for assessment of additional power system flexibility

To solve the actual task of assessing additional flexible generation needed to smooth variable renewable energies (VRE) disturbances in the Power Systems worldwide the original method for statistical processing of wind and solar PV generation variability data was proposed in the article. The proposed method allows processing the historical data of VRE day-by-day and hour-to-hour generation and assessing the levels of potential disturbances this type of generation could cause. These disturbances should be smoothened in the Power System by others, usually conventional generators at least to ensure grid stability and electricity quality. Currently, at the stage of the power systems starts transformation, the sources of power system flexibility basically are the power plants whose individual flexibility is characterized by three dimensions: adjustability, ramping and lead time. Lack of flexible generation causes VRE curtailments that negatively affect economic efficiency of such clean generation. From the other hand, the improvement of existing power plants flexibility requires an essential investments and time to retrofit them, and because of that the important question - what is the required level of power system flexibility is needed to smooth current and future VRE generation. The results of statistical data processing for wind and solar PV hour-by-hour power output changes allow accepting the hypothesis about the normal distribution of these data sets. The article presents the key parameters of theoretical normal distributions are calculated for wind and solar PV data sets for 2019 and 2020 as a whole, and also for winter and summer seasons, which allow obtaining a more precise assessment of variability levels for renewables, especially for solar PV hour-by-hour generation changes. The assessments obtained in the article also could be used as the first step for more efficient management of the electricity market, for instance, forecasting the required level of flexible generation or ancillary services market for intraday power system balancing. Keywords: variable renewable energy, power system, flexibility, generation profile, statistical data processing