Economic and Low-carbon Regulation Strategy for Flexible Resources in Providing Demand Response

The volatile power output from ever-increasing intermittent renewable energy such as wind and solar generation imposes challenge on the secure operation of power systems, and more regulation capability is demanded. Flexible resources such as distributed generation, controllable loads, and energy storage could provide regulation capability and should then be properly employed for maintaining the security and enhancing the economics of the power system concerned. Given this background, this paper proposes an economic and low-carbon scheduling model for flexible resources in providing demand response. The established model covers energy storage, flexible loads, and a stepped carbon trading mechanism, aiming to minimize overall operation costs, smooth load fluctuations, and ensure secure operation. The IEEE 33-bus power system is served for demonstrating the proposed method. Simulation results for different scenarios show that the joint optimization strategy of carbon trading and source-load-storage could achieve good economics and low-carbon performance, and significantly reduce system load fluctuations.