Coordinating Wind Turbines and Flexible Consumers with Cooperative and Competitive Agents: (Extended Abstract)

Meeting the 20-20-20 objectives put forward by the European Commission to increase the share of renewable energy production in Belgium to 13% of the gross final energy consumption, requires the installation of large wind farms both onand offshore. Integrating these wind farms into existing distribution infrastructure is challenging because of potential congestion caused by imbalance between wind turbine energy production and consumers’ energy offtake. One technical constraints that needs to be considered is guaranteeing that existing cables can cope with the increased wind energy injection into the grid. Adding energy production elements to existing grids can cause power rates to increase past the rates that would ensure safe cable operation. Upgrading existing cable infrastructure to cope with increased power rates would lead to a costly replacement of existing cables. Experience in industrial projects shows that this is an actual problem DSO’s are facing when incorporating wind turbines into existing distribution infrastructure. Considering that these excessive power rates only occur occasionaly, alternative remedies are investigated. Literature describes ANM techniques for dealing with these forms of increased power production related current congestion in a more cost effective manner [3]. Active Network Management (ANM) techniques describe a class of techniques for actively performing steering actions in distribution network management to minimize congestion problems from excessive wind power production. This work focuses on DSM as an ANM technique to resolve the problem of upstream current congestion. The distinction is made between two phases and we propose algorithms for both phases. The first phase deals with an ahead of time planning phase where grid investment or reinforcement has to be outweighed against demand-side management (DSM) [3]. A second phase considers a real time situation for online allocation of ANM resources based on local wind production forecasts. For online power flexibility allocation, two mechanisms, a cooperative contract-net based mechanisms