Prosumer Integration in Flexibility Markets: A Bid Development and Pricing Model

Abstract

The impact of renewable energies on the power grid is continuously increasing. Besides the emission-free power generation, the renewable energies often are the cause for congested grids, component failure and costly interventions by the distribution system operators (DSO) and transmission system operators (TSO) in order to maintain grid stability. The scientific community discusses in recent years the usability of distributed energy resources (DER) as flexible devices. However, no approach can be found that actually quantifies the potential flexibility and sets a price to it. The model presented in this paper optimizes the charging operation of an electric vehicle (EV) according to a price signal with a state of the art exhaustive search algorithm. Furthermore, this model offers all possible deviations from the optimal operation as flexibility to a corresponding market platform and sets a price to each offer, which is dependent on the future price level of the energy. With this model, it is possible to offer positive and negative prices for flexibility. The proposed model shows that an exhaustive enumeration algorithm is feasible to calculate flexibility offers, prices and applicable on currently discussed platform models. The example of an EV charging schedule is successfully modelled and described in this paper.

Operational Flexibility of Small-Scale Electricity-Coupled Heat Generating Units

“…Determining flexibility as feasible deviations from a previously determined optimal schedule is another approach for flexibility quantification found in the literature. For example, [31] optimize charging cycles for electric vehicles and formulate bids for flexibility based on feasible delayed or advanced charging compared to scheduled charging.…”

“…Different from other approaches for quantifying flexibility, such as [27,31], no (optimal) reference schedule needs to be determined for the flexibility calculation, but any operation between two extreme (minimum and maximum) schedules is possible. The calculation of this set of feasible schedules, or operational zone as we refer to it here, does not require computationally expensive machine learning approaches as used in [12,18].…”

Grid-connected photovoltaics prosumers to support smart city development in Rwanda: A case study for Ayabaraya Village

“…By involving the customers in energy demand response, by asking them to modify their normal consumption patterns in response to a utility's need will lead to reliable and sustainable energy generation and consumption. That has started and the electricity market has been made open and by now, a limited number of prosumers are running their business in Rwanda [12,13]. So far, the power purchasing agreement (PPA) is being used as a contractual document between prosumers or energy developers and national utility, which stands for an electricity retailer.…”

Quantifying the Flexibility of Electric Vehicles in Germany and California—A Case Study

“…While regulation and various market designs for energy trading already exist, academic and industrial research now focus on introducing unique flexibility platforms [6]. Such new platforms will allow residential consumers and prosumers to participate with their distributed energy resources (DER)-such as combined-heat-and-power units (CHP), electric vehicles (EV), residential heat pumps (HP), photovoltaic systems (PV), and battery storage units-as well as large industrial parties to offer flexibility [7][8][9]. In the future, SO will be able to manage grid congestions in a less resource-intensive manner and potentially avoid costly grid expansions and the curtailment of VRE [10,11].…”

“…Zade et al published an HEMS model that optimizes the charging process of an electric vehicle (EV), and calculates the flexibility based on synthetic electricity prices, vehicle availabilities, and energy demands [9]. In order to analyze the realistic flexibility potential of EVs in a distribution grid, this paper describes a detailed case study conducted with vehicle field trial data from California, USA and Germany, three electricity tariffs, two controller strategies, and three charging power levels.…”