Robust provisioning of demand-side flexibility under electricity price uncertainty

With the successful integration of renewable energy sources to the grid, the volatility of supply in the system will increase and therefore a gap between power generation and demand on the grid may occur, which causes the grid frequency to move away from its nominal value. To avoid this scenario, frequency regulation service has been introduced and demand-side flexible loads have been widely considered in recent years. In this paper, we focus on the flexibility of an HVAC system in the building sector and propose a robust optimization approach to improve the user's decision making subject to the electricity price uncertainty. In particular, by explicitly taking into account the price uncertainty in the demand-side frequency regulation, we develop an intelligent building energy management system. The deterministic and robust solutions are compared to explain the influence of price uncertainty on the users' contribution in the frequency regulation service and daily energy payment. The importance of comfort weight factor on the demand-side power consumption profile as well as the corresponding up and down reserve are also investigated. According to the numerical analysis, the robust optimization approach may bring about monetary savings in the electricity bill of the user, particularly in a drastic uncertainty level.