Unit commitment with primary frequency regulation constraints

The unit commitment problem with tertiary reserve requirements has been broadly studied. Such reserves, when needed, are centrally deployed with relatively slow time constants of the order of minutes. In contrast, the scheduling of units offering primary frequency regulation reserve deployable in a decentralized manner within seconds of a contingency has received relatively little attention. In this paper, we formulate and solve a multiperiod unit commitment that simultaneously accounts for both primary and tertiary reserve constraints. What makes this scheduling problem particularly challenging is the characteristic that primary frequency regulation reserves have a common single degree of freedom, namely, the system frequency deviation.