DER VET User Guide/Services

This page organizes all value streams (services) available for DERs to provide in DER-VET.

Services in DER-VET are activities the DER mix can do to generate value. Services are broken into two categories – “constraint (pre-dispatch) services” and “optimization services”.

Constraint services require fixed contributions of products from the DERs to achieve. They are called “pre-dispatch” services because they are treated as a priori constraints in the optimization problem, so are effectively modeled before the operation of the DERs are known. Services relating to reliability or safety are usually in this category. These constraints are combined with all other constraints in the core optimization

Optimization services are those where the economic value of the service and the amount the DERs participate are flexible and ultimately determined by what minimizes the net present cost of the problem. These services are usually economic in nature, like customer bill reduction services or wholesale market participation.

Constraint Services

The pre-dispatch services in DER-VET are used to model scenario features that introduce operational requirements that must be satisfied (as opposed to flexible economic objectives). Before the optimization occurs, a compatibility check is performed on the constraints that model pre-dispatch services to ensure the case is feasible (i.e. no two constraints directly conflict). If conflicts occur, the user is notified of the infeasibility and the analysis halts. This check cannot catch every possible infeasibility, so some are left for the optimizer to catch, which results in a different error message.

The constraint services in DER-VET include:

Reliability

Asset Upgrade Deferral

Demand Response

Resource Adequacy

User-Defined Service

Optimization Services

Optimization services are financially beneficial services for which participation is not required. Participation in these services is determined by the optimization. The optimization takes as inputs the DER mix’s technical parameters, operating constraints, prices for wholesale services, and tariff rates if the system is located behind the meter, to produce an operational profile that maximizes the combined service value and minimizes its costs.

The optimization services in DER-VET include:

Wholesale Energy Market Participation

Retail Energy Cost Reduction(all systems must participate in either wholesale or retail energy services)

Frequency Regulation

Spinning Reserves

Non-Spinning Reserves

Load Following

Retail Demand Charge Management