Techno-economic Assessment of Reserve Service Provision from Microgrids for Resilience Enhancement

Microgrids' operational flexibility can be exploited for enhancing system resilience to keep the lights on in the vicinity of these microgrids when the main electricity system is disrupted under varying severe contingency events. This work investigates the techno-economic performance of microgrids in this paradigm, whereby providing reserve services becomes a new revenue stream. An optimisation technique using stochastic programming is proposed with the objective to minimise total operational cost. This enables the quantification of capacity contribution to different reserve services considering the uncertainty of contingency events. Without loss of generality, two representative types of microgrids are analysed while varying reserve price. The results show higher reserve prices lead to more capacity contribution, however a clear saturation is observed. The contribution can also be very sensitive to the reserve price varying within certain ranges. In summary, the proposed assessment can inform relevant stakeholders on the microgrids' contribution in reserve service provision.