Quantifying accommodated domain of wind power for flexible look-ahead unit commitment

Abstract Properly scheduling flexible regulation resources plays a critical role in reliable operation of the power systems with high penetration of wind power. However, it remains an open question as to how to decide an operation guideline for this system to avoid the security violation and shortage of flexible ramping capacities (FRC). Amongst, it is crucial to determine the wind power injections that the system can accommodate by carefully considering FRC requirement from the whole scheduling interval. In this paper, the concept of accommodated domain of wind power (ADWP) is proposed as a metric for quantifying flexibility and an operational guideline. On this basis, two approaches for flexible look-ahead unit commitment (LAUC) are presented: Three-stage interval optimization approach, by which the largest ADWP is obtained and its corresponding operating cost is also optimized; and scenario-based stochastic optimization approach is used to minimize the overall cost, so as to obtain the most economical ADWP. Test results of IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems show that the proposed approaches for LAUC can effectively handle the ramping requirements and reduce the overall cost.