The Importance of the Power System Flexibility and its Evaluation

Nontraditional power sources

Abstract

Generation units are changing crucially in many power systems worldwide. The concern for the environment and energy security, as well as rising fuel prices, have led to significant, sustainable growth of wind and solar electricity generation capacity worldwide. Long-term transmission and generation planning face numerous challenges to accommodate the integration of a high penetration of variable generation. The system flexibility, or the ability of a system to meet changes in demand and variable generation production, is one such issue receiving much attention. An emerging challenge in power system planning is to evaluate the ability of an existing system to successfully integrate a targeted penetration of variable generation. As system planning techniques evolve with the demands from variable generation, the flexibility of a system to manage the periods of high variability will need to be assessed. The energy system flexibility has a very important role in ensuring the sustainability of the system. As a result of the integration of renewable energy sources, the problem of ensuring additional flexibility of the system becomes even more important. This article aims to discuss the issues on flexibility in the system, as well as the need for additional flexibility, resulting from the integration of variable sources such as wind and photovoltaic energy. Besides, in the article, the assessment of the flexibility of the energy system is given based on the visualization principle.