Multi-Timescale Simulation of Non-Spinning Reserve in Wholesale Electricity Markets

Non-spinning reserve (NSR) represents an ancillary service that is intended to help power systems recover from unexpected contingencies. Many innovative methods to size NSR have been proposed in the literature. To evaluate their performance in terms of system reliability and economics, NSR allocation and deployment are needed in power market simulation models. This paper presents a multi-timescale market simulation to examine the allocation of NSR in wholesale electricity markets. Specifically, we develop a set of unit commitment (UC) and economic dispatch (ED) models and place emphasis on the simulation of thermal units over a variety of timescales. The performance of the models are evaluated with a synthetic power system that is built on the footprint of the Texas power market. The multi-timescale forecasts of load, wind, and solar power are aligned with the real-world Texas market timeline. By applying NSR requirements generated from a baseline and a dynamic sizing method, the results indicate that the dynamic method can significantly reduce the penalty cost associated with reserve shortage, though the total cost is slightly increased due to greater production cost.