Evaluation of stochastic unit commitment for renewable integration in California's energy markets

California's proactive goals for developing renewable energy will alter the net demand profile for scheduling dispatchable resources to maintain system balance. Anticipating these changes, the California ISO has implemented market features to promote flexible generation, including a flexibility reserve constraint in market optimization, which is potentially a new market product. This paper builds on previous research to evaluate the potential benefits of stochastic unit commitment as another way of responding to uncertainty in intermittent resources' output. As in the previous research, the focus is the day-ahead residual unit commitment (RUC) process, whose purpose is to ensure adequate resources for real-time dispatch. This study applies a more detailed market model to test observations that stochastic unit commitment might improve the RUC process, finding that incremental benefits of reduced volatility have trade-offs in operating costs.