Flexibility Envelopes for Power System Operational Planning

Modern power systems are undergoing a transitional phase, increasingly incorporating renewable energy sources (RES) to harness their economic and environmental benefits. The main challenge with this transitional phase is the management of the increased variability and uncertainty in the power balance. Legacy operation and planning practices are gradually seen as becoming inadequate or ill-adapted in addressing this challenge. One particular gap in the state of the art, which is of great importance, is estimating the operational flexibility potential of individual power system assets and their aggregation at the system level. System operators need to evaluate and plan ahead flexibility adequacy for their power systems in order to ensure feasible and economical operation under high RES penetration. Likewise, asset owners need to integrate the notion of asset flexibility as part of their investment and operations decisions. To this end, we propose the concept of the flexibility envelope to describe the flexibility potential dynamics of a power system and its individual resources in the operational planning time-frame. We demonstrate that the resulting envelope dynamics can be a starting point for flexibility adequacy planning in systems with highly variable generation.