A deterministic metric of stochastic operational flexibility

Operational flexibility describes a power system's ability to respond with controllable real power resources to rapid changes in power balance error. For balancing areas with high penetrations of stochastic generation, these changes can be large enough to cause operating problems. We propose a deterministic operational flexibility metric to summarize stochastic information about current and forecast system state and power balance error. The metric intuitively characterizes the system and gives a duty scheduler actionable intelligence that dovetails with existing deterministic indicators of system state. The resulting information-dense summary can improve schedule quality both as a visualization tool for human schedulers and as a versatile formulation for dispatch algorithms.