Flexibility Auctions: A Framework for Managing Imbalance Risk

Today, flexibility from a limited number of distributed energy resources (DERs) is offered in wholesale electricity markets, and the value of flexibility is not yet recognized for economic hedging of delivery risk. Under a three-year project funded by the ARPA-E PERFORM program, our team is working towards developing an integrated risk management framework that will leverage flexibility from distributed and bulk resources to cost-effectively and reliably manage delivery risk of intermittent resources. Two concepts are at the core of the proposed integrated risk management framework:

(A) flexibility options, which are a novel type of options and enable wholesale electricity market participants to hedge uncertainty by buying flexibility.

(B) DER flexibility scores, which provide a way for utilities or aggregators to classify assets in groups with different likelihood of delivering contracted flexibility.

This presentation will focus on the proposed ISO-product “flexibility options”, which is complementary to ramp and other products being introduced by ISOs/RTOs to manage net load uncertainties. Participating resources with imbalanced risk can buy flexibility options to hedge their production, whereas grid-connected resources that can provide physical flexibility can offer flexibility options. We will present basics of the formulation for a day-ahead ISO market that matches buyers and sellers of this hedge in coordination with existing capabilities to schedule energy and ancillary services, and outline how their settlements mitigate the impact of imbalance risk.