A Review of Power System Flexibility with High Penetration of Renewables

The notion of secure operation of power systems, with its present semantic, dates back to the last decade. Since then, tremendous research effort has investigated secure operation of the power system. Nevertheless, operators are still faced with security issues, with even larger uncertainty, however, caused by the integration of renewable energy sources (RES). The system's ability to cope with the volatility of RES and load becomes a critical issue in power system operation. This paper surveys the literature on the concepts of power system flexibility, indices of flexibility, and implementation of the concept of flexibility in power system security. The paper proceeds to review the origin of the reserve problem, the meaning of reserve, its technical classification and related economical aspects. The paper highlights the effect of renewables on these aspects, and suggests new research directions.