A Co-Simulation Framework for Assessing Transmission Market Impacts of New Controls on the Grid

The power grid is transitioning to a more integrated and complex system with increasing flexible energy resources at the distribution level. Although such resources present a huge potential for enhancing operational efficiency, improper coordination can cause operational issues impacting the stability of the grid and thereby necessitates comprehensive assessment within integrated bulk power systems. Bulk system operations typically rely on a series of complex market process coordinated over multiple time-horizons. Simulating such operations can be complicated with a high barrier to entry. This work presents wrapper-based interfaces, leveraging MATPOWER-MOST to reduce the complexities for emulating wholesale market operations and minimize the barriers for evaluating impacts of coordination designs. The wrapper contains several functions that encapsulate the complex formatting and coordination requirements between market processes and organizes the co-simulation-based information exchange. The interfaces are implemented on an 8-bus test system representing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region. Simulation results demonstrate the wrapper capabilities to model wholesale market operations and evaluate the impact of coordinating flexible resources through appropriate operational metrics.