Network-secure bidding strategy for aggregators under uncertainty

Abstract

The widespread adoption of distributed energy resources (DER) is creating an opportunity for aggregators to transform DER flexibility into electricity market services. In a scenario of high DER integration, aggregators will need to coordinate the optimisation of DER with the distribution system operator (DSO) in order to avoid congestion and voltage incursions in the distribution networks. This coordination task is notably complex since both network and DER operation are impacted by multiple sources of uncertainty. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new bidding strategy for aggregators of prosumers to make robust network-secure bidding decisions in day-ahead energy and reserve markets. The bidding strategy computes robust network-secure bids without jeopardising the data privacy of aggregators and the DSO. The data privacy is preserved by using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose a stochastic network-secure bidding problem into bidding and network subproblems and solve them separately and in parallel. The uncertainty of the prosumers is incorporated in the bidding problem through scenarios of load, renewable generation, and DER preferences. Our experiments show that the proposed bidding strategy computes robust bids against distribution network problems, outperforming deterministic and stochastic state-of-the-art bidding strategies in terms of cost and network observability.