Full Title: Regional Real-Time PV Spinning Reserve Estimator
Author(s): Mengmeng Cai, Vahan Gevorgian, Govind Saraswat, William B. Hobbs, Clyde Loutan, and Mahesh Morjaria
Publisher(s): National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Publication Date: March 2, 2024
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Description (excerpt):
Curtailed photovoltaic (PV) generation can act a zero-marginal-cost spinning reserve that can be used for a number of active power control services. Unlike traditional spinning reserve providers, however—i.e., fossil-fueled generators, which have well-defined operating characteristics, e.g., available headroom or potential high limit (PHL)—PV plants have by nature variable and uncertain operating characteristics. To ensure the effective coordination between PV plants and the system operator during an active power control event, accurate knowledge of the PV PHL is essential. It ensures that enough headroom is reserved by the PV plants to deliver the grid services in real time and informs feasible and economically optimal dispatch decisions made by the market operator.
To tackle this challenge, a novel reference-control grouping-based PV plant reserve estimation method has been proposed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under past projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. The estimation method separates inverters within a plant into two groups: a control group and a reference group. Although the reference group is reserved to operate at its PHL, the control group can be curtailed to provide the grid services. Real-time outputs from the reference inverters are used to estimate the PHL for the whole plant based on the ratio between the capacities of the reference group and of the plant.