Exploiting DERs’ Flexibility Provision in Distribution and Transmission Systems Interface

This paper presents a new market-based framework to exploit distributed energy resources’ (DERs) flexibility in distribution and transmission systems. This framework targets intra-hourly flexibility requirements of energy systems. In this regard, a local market is operated in distribution network to exploit DERs’ capabilities. Local market is cleared in coordination with wholesale market to optimize DERs’ flexibility procurement for meeting intra-hourly variability and uncertainty in distribution and transmission systems. In the proposed framework, a technical virtual power plant (TVPP) operates day-ahead (DA) local energy and flexibility markets in which DER aggregators take part. Furthermore, the TVPP participates in DA wholesale energy and flexibility markets which are cleared by the market operator and the transmission system operator, respectively. In this framework, all agents’ preferences and their transactions are addressed using a bilevel model with multiple lower levels. The proposed model is reformulated into a mixed integer linear programming problem by utilizing strong duality theory, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions and primal-dual counterpart. The model is implemented on an IEEE standard test system. The results demonstrate effectiveness of the framework in utilizing DERs’ capabilities to meet flexibility requirements as well as satisfying agents’ preferences.