Optimal day-ahead scheduling for explicit demand response provision of a renewable energy hub with hot water preparation

With the rising share of intermittent renewable energy in the energy mix, there is a growing need for the employment of demand side management. End consumption/production power grid nodes should, in the future, participate in the power system balancing market with the demand response service provision. This paper introduces a joint optimization framework for the day-ahead scheduling of a renewable energy hub that simultaneously determines nominal operational behaviour and bidirectional (positive and negative) explicit demand response capacity. The probabilities of flexibility contracting are considered in the objective function, such that the expectation of the operational cost for interaction with the power system is minimised. Scenarios of multiple activations during the day are taken into account through joint optimization in the worst-case sense of all possible flexibility activation scenarios. The formulation utilises Linear Programming (LP), ensuring global optimality and high computational efficiency. Case studies involving an industrial plant and a power-to-X hub demonstrate significant expected operational cost reductions of 31% and 17%, respectively, compared to standard deterministic scheduling. A free software tool that implements the outlined procedure is provided.