Leveraging P90 Requirement: Flexible Resources Bidding in Nordic Ancillary Service Markets

Abstract: The P90 requirement of the Danish transmission system operator, Energinet, incentivizes flexible resources with stochastic power consumption/production baseline to bid in Nordic ancillary service markets with the minimum reliability of 90%, i.e., letting them cause reserve shortfall with the probability of up to 10%. Leveraging this requirement, we develop a distributionally robust joint chance-constrained optimization model for aggregators of flexible resources to optimize their volume of reserve capacity to be offered. Having an aggregator of electric vehicles as a case study, we show how distributional robustness is key for the aggregator when making bidding decisions in a non-stationary uncertain environment. We also develop a heuristic based on a grid search for the system operator to adjust the P90 requirement and the level of conservativeness, aiming to procure the maximum reserve capacity from stochastic resources with least expected shortfall.