Spinning Reserve Estimation in Microgrids

In this paper, a probabilistic methodology for estimating spinning reserve requirement in microgrids is proposed. The spinning reserve amount is determined by a tradeoff between reliability and economics. The unreliability of units and uncertainties caused by load and nondispatchable units are both considered. In order to reduce computation burden, various uncertainties are aggregated. A multistep method is proposed to efficiently consider the combinatorial characteristic of unit outage events. The computation efficiency of spinning reserve calculations can be greatly improved. The optimization is solved by mixed integer linear programming (MILP). Two case studies are carried out to illustrate the proposed method. Their results and discussions are also presented.