Coordinating wind turbines and flexible consumers with cooperative and competitive agents

Integrating wind farms into existing distribution grids is challenging because of potential congestion caused by imbalance between wind turbine energy production and consumers’ energy offtake. Demand-side management (DSM) techniques address this imbalance by dynamically increasing the consumers’ offtake, thereby allowing unrestrained power generation by wind farms. In practice, distribution grids are constrained by power line capacity, a fact often ignored by existing literature. Present paper describes a novel and realistic application of DSM to a constrained distribution grid where multiple self-interested agents can provide flexibility to the distribution system operator (DSO). DSM is evaluated online, where agents’ flexibility is allocated in real-time using limited local forecasts, and offline, where a central agent has complete foresight to compute a theoretical upper bound and enables the DSO to evaluate its infrastructure investments. In online simulations a cooperative mechanism is compared to a competitive strategy proof auction mechanism. The results indicate that the competitive mechanism has a lower allocative efficiency compared to the cooperative mechanism. This online result questions the trend of increased usage of markets in industry while the offline experiment shows that the current activation constraints of the DSO prevents the system from reaching global allocation optima.status: publishe