Approximating Flexibility in Distributed Energy Resources: A Geometric Approach

With increasing availability of communication and control infrastructure at the distribution systems, it is expected that the distributed energy resources (DERs) will take an active part in future power systems operations. One of the main challenges associated with integration of DERs in grid planning and control is in estimating the available flexibility in a collection of (heterogeneous) DERs, each of which may have local constraints that vary over time. In this work, we present a geometric approach for approximating the flexibility of a DER in modulating its active and reactive power consumption. The proposed method is agnostic about the type and model of the DERs, thereby facilitating a plug-and-play approach, and allows scalable aggregation of the flexibility of a collection of (heterogeneous) DERs at the distributed system level. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.