Spatio-Temporal Flexibility Management in Low-Carbon Power Systems

The deepening penetration of renewable power generation is challenging how the minute balancing of supply and demand is carried out by power system operators. Several proposals to short-term operational planning rely on robust optimization to offer guarantees on the ability of the operator to meet a wide array of possible scenarios. The main downside of these approaches is their conservative results whose operating costs and/or carbon footprint may be sub-economical. Such results come by because these approaches immunize their solutions for the required level of security against realizations of potential events within their uncertainty set. Moreover, these approaches also often ignore the inherent time and spatial couplings of wind and solar generation variability. In this article, we seek to reduce the conservativeness of the robust solution by proposing the concept of spatio-temporal flexibility requirement envelopes. We show how it is able to efficiently capture and model the temporal trends and spatial correlation of multisite renewable generation and load. A mathematical program for energy scheduling is also developed using the projections of this envelope. We showcase the use and advantages of spatio-temporal flexibility requirement envelopes and their associated scheduling approach in a microgrid and on a modified IEEE Reliability Test System.