Quantification of Steel Plant Production Load Regulation Capabilities Considering Flexibility Services

As a typical heavy industry, the steel industry has great potential in demand response due to its high load capacity and high level of automation. However, the flexibility of steel plants in regulation the power demand is constrained by a large number of process and batch constraints, which are not well characterized in traditional models. Therefore, this paper constructs a production model of reheat furnaces and rolling mills in steel plants and a rolling unit model to describe the batch production of billets. Based on the production process models, an optimal evaluation method is proposed to quantify the flexibility of steel plants’ production loads. The proposed method is tested using production data from a real steel plant. The results show that reasonable arrangements of the steel plant’s production plan can achieve economic and efficient operation. The existence of the rolling unit makes the load appear concentrated, but at the same time limits its internal regulation ability.