A New Local Market Structure for Meeting Customer-Level Flexibility Needs

Flexibility issues are the main problems arising from the high injection of renewables and distributed energy resources. In order to solve this problem, flexibility potential of distribution-located flexible energy resources should be deployed. In this way, this paper proposes a new local market structure for meeting customer-level flexibility need. In the proposed market structure, the flexibility need of each customer is divided into two parts regarding to the uncertainty coming from forecast errors and variability of the renewable energy sources. In addition, the flexible energy resources are categorized into three types according to the controllability of the flexible resource. Finally, the local flexibility market is settled by matching the flexibility production with the flexibility needs. This is done by considering simultaneously the needed flexibility types with the type of available flexibilities. The local flexibility market is implemented for a hypothetical test system in order to prove the efficiency and liquidity of the proposed market structure.