Impact of Spatial Variation in Flexibility on System Operations in Electric Power Systems

With the proliferation of renewable energy resources in electric power systems, energy flexibility has become crucial to maintaining reliable system operations. Such flexibility can be extracted from utility operated and/or consumer-owned devices, such as storage devices, electric vehicles, etc. From a grid operator’s perspective, it is of great importance to systematically characterize equivalent dispatch configurations in which different flexibility dispatch schedules yield the same operational characteristics (e.g., congestion patterns within the power system). In this paper, we provide a convex optimization-based perturbation analysis technique to identify such equivalent flexibility dispatch configurations, in which system congestion patterns (as reflected by the binding and non-binding optimization constraints) remain the same. The developed perturbation analysis-based techniques are evaluated on a modified IEEE 30 bus network.