Abstract
Wind energy sources have created new challenges in power system scheduling to follow the network load. Gas fired units with high ramping could better deal with inherent uncertainties of wind power compared to other power generation sources. The natural gas system constraints affect the flexibility of natural gas-fired power plants in the electrical market. In this paper, three solutions have been proposed to cover the challenges of gas system constraints and the uncertainty of wind power: 1) using information-gap decision theory (IGDT) based robust approach to address the uncertainty caused by the intrinsic nature of wind power, 2) Integration of compressed air energy storage (CAES), and demand response (DR) in day-ahead scheduling and 3) considering flexible ramping products in order to ensure reliable operations, there must be enough ramp to eliminate the variability of wind power in real-time dispatch stage. This paper proposes an IGDT-based robust security constrained unit commitment (SCUC) model for coordinated electricity and natural gas systems with the integration of wind power and emerging flexible resources while taking the flexible ramping products into account. Numerical tests demonstrate the effect of emerging flexible resources on a reduction of system operation cost and the uncertainty of predicted wind power.