Enhanced Ramping Product Design to Improve Power System Reliability

The roll-out of a flexible ramping product provides Independent System Operators (ISOs) with the ability to address ramping capacity shortages. ISOs procure flexible ramping capability by committing more generating units or reserving a certain amount of head room of committed units. In this paper, we raise the concern of the possibility that the procured ramping capability cannot be deployed in real-time operations. As a solution to the non-delivery issue, we provide a new ramping product designed to improve reliability and reduce the expected operating cost. The trajectory of start-up and shutdown processes is also considered in determining the ramping capability. A new optimization problem is formulated using mixed integer linear programming to be readily applied to practical power system operation. The performance of this proposed method is verified through simulations using a small-scale system and IEEE 118-bus systems. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed formulation can realize improved generation scheduling alleviating capacity shortages.