Modeling Consumer Flexibility of an Aggregator Participating in the Wholesale Power Market and the Regulation Capacity Market

This paper presents an optimization framework for a load aggregator participating in the wholesale power market and the regulation capacity market. The objective of the aggregator is to minimize the total energy costs of a portfolio of energy consumers. The market organization is based on the Nordic model. The optimization model includes a detailed representation of the physical system at each consumer. Flexibility may come from load reductions, substitutions between energy carriers and from use of energy storage. A case study is performed using actual data from a set of Norwegian electricity consumers to test the model and estimate the value of aggregation in the current market framework.