Flexibility-enhanced strategies of generations to improve the integration of renewable energy considering uncertainties

Power systems with a high proportion of renewable energy are confronted with immense challenges and a huge amount of renewable energy has been curtailed. To promote the integration of renewable energy, this paper focus on exploiting the generation flexibilities. For hydropower units, a high-resolution dynamic regulation model of reservoir volume is proposed, in which the real-time situation of inflow is considered. The reservoir’s flexibility which is hindered by the static flood water limit level (FLWL) is exploited by this method. For thermal units, a deep peak regulation of thermal is constructed to enhance the system’s flexibility. Furthermore, considering the uncertainties of renewable energy, a chance-constrained reservoir flexible model influenced by random reservoir inflow and a chance-constrained spinning reserve and power flow model influenced by the wind uncertainty are developed. Based on those models and their coordination, an optimal dispatching model considering generation flexibilities and uncertainties is proposed. Simulation results on the IEEE 30-bus system show that the proposed model with multiple flexible resources can increase wind power penetration by 10% and save half of the cost compared with the conventional dispatching methods. These results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method whether the integration of renewable energy or the saving of operation costs.