Towards a safe maximisation of renewable’s flexibility in power transmission sub-grids: An MPC approach

This paper contributes to the current trend of development of model-based predictive controls for the operation of sub-transmission grids with storage devices and significant distributed generation. As a main contribution of the current work, it is shown that a receding horizon optimization is able to not only automatically handle the curtailment levels but also to indicate the levels of relaxation for the curtailments, whenever they are admissible. The major difficulty in this process resides in the fact that a reduction of the curtailment implies potential increase of the generation power and can lead to transmission line congestions. To avoid the ensuing safety constraint violations, an upper bound is used for the available power to cope with the lack of information when the curtailment is active. The controller’s performance is evaluated via simulations through a case study of a real sub-transmission area in the French power grid.