Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Aggregators are acknowledged as key agents to enable the active participation of household and commercial distributed energy resources (DER) in electricity markets. In recent years, many researchers and practitioners have been working on the development of diverse network-secure and network-insecure bidding strategies to support the participation of DER aggregators in electricity markets. An example of this is the extensive work developed by the authors of this paper in various R&D projects with industry. This paper builds on the experience gained in previous works and its main contribution is a thorough comparison between these strategies, resulting in an extensive discussion of their pros and cons. The discussion compares the economic and network security performance of the strategies, as well as their communication, computational, and data privacy requirements. To discuss and quantify these aspects, we formulate, implement, and test various bidding strategies on a real-world MV-LV distribution network with 2 aggregators and 522 customers for multiple DER scenarios. The discussion of the results provides realistic and valuable information on the pros and cons of each strategy, helping energy system stakeholders to understand which strategy may better fit their needs.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
This paper presents a general comparison between network-secure and network-free optimization frameworks to manage flexible multi-energy resources. Both frameworks were implemented in a test case that includes electricity, gas, and heat distribution networks. Several potential scenarios for the decarbonization of the multi-energy system were simulated. The economic, technical, and environmental impacts were compiled. The network-secure framework is highly recommended to avoid service disruptions due to network violations, but its implementation comes with a price - overall operational costs increase, sometimes substantially.