Utilizing flywheels to provide regulation services for systems with renewable resources

With the increasing penetration of renewable resources in power systems, more operational flexibility is required to deal with the uncertainty of intermittent generation. In particular, fast acting regulation reserves are needed to maintain the load-generation balance. This paper focuses on evaluating the benefits of energy storage in providing regulation services for real-time operation. Among the various storage technologies, flywheels have fast ramping capabilities and are, thus, very attractive for providing regulation services. In this study, a two-step framework is proposed for scheduling regulation reserve and dispatching it in real-time operations. The proposed method is tested on the RTS96 one-zone model to demonstrate the benefits of utilizing energy storage for providing regulation services.