Procurement of regulation services for a grid with high-penetration wind generation resources: a case study of ERCOT

This study presents two enhancements at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) for coping with the uncertainties and variations brought by high penetration of wind generation resources (GRs). The first enhancement is the incorporation of a novel short-term wind forecast algorithm into the look-ahead dispatch process to improve the calculation of locational marginal prices and generation schedules. The second enhancement is the development of a multi-time-scale method for quantifying regulation service requirements considering the combined impact of wind variations on governor response, automatic generation control, and economic dispatch results. A simulation model that is capable of simulating all relevant scheduling and operation processes from a few seconds to a few hours is developed to verify the performance of the proposed method. The ERCOT operational model and historical data are used to demonstrate that the derived regulation requirements can meet the ERCOT reliability needs by considering additional generation variations and uncertainties caused by wind GRs. The proposed methods are readily applicable to other regional power grids with high penetration of variable GRs.