Three-stage Power Flow & Flexibility Reserve Co-Optimization for Converter Dominated Distribution Network Lookahead Model using Blockchain & S-ADMM — I: Method

The integration of power electronic converter (PEC)-based renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) and controllable loads in electric power grids is growing exponentially due to increased interest in reducing carbon emissions. However, the uncertainty in DER power output limits their contribution to the overall system reliability and alleviates its flexibility. Hence, three-stage power flow and flexibility reserve optimization are proposed to address these issues. In the first stage, the epistemic and aleatory uncertainties in the power flow problem are addressed by the proposed parameterized deterministic lookahead (DLA) method. The flexibility metric “variation in generation capacity (VIGC)” and sharing alternating direction method of multipliers (S-ADMM) based distributed optimization is used to schedule flexibility reserves and minimize its cost in the second and the third stage to enhance system flexibility. The flexibility reserve sharing and blockchain/smart contract-based bidding to schedule those reserves for multiple balancing authority (BA) areas are also proposed in this work. The proposed algorithm’s results and e?ectiveness are presented in Part II of this work.