Bi-level Energy Trading Model Incorporating Large-scale Biogas Plant and Demand Response Aggregator

Increasing intermittent renewable energy sources (RESs) intensifies the imbalance between demand and generation, entailing the diversification of the deployment of electrical energy storage systems (ESSs). A large-scale biogas plant (LBP) installed with heating devices and biogas energy storage (BES) usually exhibits a storage-like characteristic of accommodating an increasing penetration level of RES in rural areas, which is addressed in this paper. By utilizing the temperature-sensitive characteristic of anaerobic digestion that enables the LBP to exhibit a storage-like characteristic, this paper proposes a bi-level energy trading model incorporating LBP and demand response aggregator (DRA) simultaneously. In this model, social welfare is maximized at the upper level while the profit of DRA is maximized at the lower level. Compared with cases only with DRA, the results show that the proposed model with the LBP improves the on-site accommodation capacity of photovoltaic (PV) generation up to 6.3%, 18.1%, and 18.9% at 30%, 40%, and 50% PV penetration levels, respectively, with a better economic performance. This nonlinear bi-level problem is finally recast by a single-level mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and solved by the Cplex solver. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated using a 33-bus test system and a sensitivity analysis is provided for analyzing what parameter influences the accommodation capacity most.