Robust spinning reserve scheduling for power systems incorporating building energy flexibility by considering load rebound

Building energy flexibility is emerging as a feasible alternative to conventional generators for providing spinning reserve, an essential means to manage power imbalance. However, load rebound often occurs after activating the passive thermal storage of buildings for upward reserve (i.e., load reduction), which may adversely affect the reliability and economy of power systems. This paper proposes a robust day-ahead scheduling strategy, which considers load rebound, for coordinating buildings and conventional generators to provide spinning reserve. Firstly, the aggregated load rebound of diverse buildings is modelled explicitly based on building thermal dynamics. The coupling between the load rebound and load reduction is quantified, enabling the convenient incorporation of building flexibility into power system reserve scheduling. Then, a two-stage robust optimization problem is formulated for optimal reserve scheduling, where the load rebound is effectively managed in all possible realizations of uncertainty in renewable generation. An adjustable uncertainty set is used to control the conservativeness level of the robust solution. The reserve for potential generator failures is also scheduled to effectively utilize building flexibility. The proposed strategy is validated on a power system modified from the current Hong Kong power system. The results show that compared to existing strategies, the proposed strategy can effectively avoid the reserve shortage caused by load rebound and achieve a reduction of up to 7.54 % in power system operation cost.