Time-sequence reserve products for electricity markets

Time-sequence reserves, or reserve policies, are planned responses to the discovery of an error in the prediction of net electrical load in a power system. By selling such a product, a market participant commits to respond with a sequence of changes in power output, for several trading intervals after and including the one in which the error was measured. The advantage of such a planned response is that, following the activation of reserves, generation or storage capacity can be freed up more systematically than is the case for existing tertiary reserve mechanisms. Furthermore, forecast errors are strongly correlated in time, and the ability to plan reserve policies taking this into account may reduce average operating costs. The authors recently published a mathematical grounding for reserve policies demonstrating their potential benefits using a simplified model of a power system - the present paper establishes the main practicalities surrounding a real implementation.