Consumers' Flexibility Estimation at the TSO Level for Balancing Services

Demand flexibility will be an inevitable part of the future power system operation to compensate stochastic variations of ever-increasing renewable generation. One way to achieve demand flexibility is to provide time-varying prices to customers at the edge of the grid. However, appropriate models are needed to estimate the potential flexibility of different types of consumers for day-ahead and real-time ancillary services (AS) provision. The proposed method should account for rebound effect and variability of the customers' reaction to the price signals. In this study, an efficient algorithm is developed for consumers' flexibility estimation by the transmission system operator (TSO) based on offline data. No aggregator or real-time communication is involved in the process of flexibility estimation, although real-time communication channels are needed to broadcast price signals to the end-users. Also, the consumers' elasticity and technical differences between various types of loads are taken into account in the formulation. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem, which is then converted to a chance-constrained programming to account for the stochastic behaviour of the consumers. Simulation results show the applicability of the proposed method for the provision of AS from consumers at the TSO level.