Incentive-based ramp-up minimization in multi-microgrid distribution systems

Installation of renewable energy sources (RESs) in power systems has been dramatically increased due to clean nature and declining investment costs in recent years. This growing trend has led to new issues in the system operational management such as intense ramps inflicted on the network called system flexibility constraints. In this regard, due to decreasing the investment in bulk flexible resources, utilities would be significantly rely on local flexible ramp resources in the system to meet the supply-demand gap in each time-period. However, development of independently operated microgrids (MGs) as a result of restructuring and privatization in the power systems has imposed limitations over the access of system operators on the operational scheduling of local flexible resources. Consequently, this paper aims to provide a framework, which enables the distribution system operator (DSO) to exploit the operational scheduling of local flexible resources in MGs with the aim of decreasing the flexible ramp-up in the system. In the proposed scheme, DSO provides bonuses to MGs collaborated in alleviating the flexible ramp-up issue in the distribution system. Moreover, Stackelberg game concept is taken into account to model the bi-level optimization in the decentralized operated system, where DSO is regarded as the leader and MGs are considered as followers. Finally, the provided flexibility-based resource scheduling framework is implemented to efficiently operate a three-microgrid system considering flexibility ramp constraints.