Enhancing Island Power Systems Operational Flexibility with Hybrid Power Plants

Hybrid power plants (HPPs) have emerged as a promising approach to enhance operational flexibility in modern power systems. However, effectively leveraging the operational flexibility of HPPs remains a significant challenge, as existing studies lack a comprehensive, generic modeling approach suitable for investigating flexibility-driven dispatch strategies. To address this gap, this paper develops an enhanced generic modeling framework for HPPs. A generic HPP identification formulation based on incidence matrices is proposed to integrate plant-level and component-level models. In addition, a unified HPP capacity formulation applicable to both AC-coupled and DC-coupled HPP configurations is developed, and the system operator’s operational preference is explicitly modeled. Different flexibility-driven dispatch strategies are investigated on a realistic island power system. The results show that enabling HPP net charging is the most effective measure to enhance operational flexibility.