Redesigning Decision-making Architectures to Exploit Multi-scale Electricity Markets

Electricity markets allow manufacturing facilities to provide energy, ancillary services, and virtual products in day-ahead and real-time settings. A recently developed multi-scale market participation model reveals that a large fraction of these economic opportunities are provided by real-time markets (updated every 5 minutes). We also observe that this trend is likely to persist as more intermittent and nondispatchable power (e.g., wind, solar) is injected into the power grid as system operators will require faster and more flexible demand and supply resources. These observations indicate that there is a need to more closely integrate decision-making layers as well as to coordinate utility systems and process operations to maximize dynamic flexibility.