Distributed optimization decomposition for joint economic dispatch and frequency regulation

Economic dispatch and frequency regulation are typically viewed as fundamentally different problems in power systems, and hence are typically studied separately. In this paper, we frame and study a joint problem that optimizes both slow timescale economic dispatch resources and fast timescale frequency regulation resources. We provide sufficient conditions under which the joint problem can be decomposed without loss of optimality into slow and fast timescale problems. These slow and fast timescale problems have appealing interpretations as the economic dispatch and frequency regulation problems respectively. Moreover, the fast timescale problem can be solved using a distributed algorithm that preserves the stability of the network during transients. We also apply this optimal decomposition to propose an efficient market mechanism for economic dispatch that coordinates with frequency regulation.