The strong coupling between electric power and heat supply highly restricts the electric power generation range of combined heat and power (CHP) units during heating seasons. This makes the system operational flexibility very low, which leads to heavy wind power curtailment, especially in the region with a high percentage of CHP units and abundant wind power energy such as northeastern China. The heat storage capacity of pipelines and buildings of the district heating system (DHS), which already exist in the urban infrastructures, can be exploited to realize the power and heat decoupling without any additional investment. We formulate a combined heat and power dispatch model considering both the pipelines’ dynamic thermal performance (PDTP) and the buildings’ thermal inertia (BTI), abbreviated as the CPB-CHPD model, emphasizing the coordinating operation between the electric power and district heating systems to break the strong coupling without impacting end users’ heat supply quality. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CPB-CHPD model has much better synergic benefits than the model considering only PDTP or BTI on wind power integration and total operation cost savings.

The issue of real-time deep down-regulation ancillary service has received increasing attention in the Northeast of China. Participation of combined heat and power plants with multitype units and flexible heating devices in the market is investigated. This paper establishes a model of feasible operating region and the coal consumption function for the combined heat and power plant. An internal optimal dispatch model and the minimum overall electric power output model for the plant satisfying a given heat load are presented. Furthermore, the models of total cost for down-regulation and average cost for deep down-regulation in two levels are established. These models are validated based on the realistic data of the plant in the Northeast of China. In case studies, the influence factors and change rules of the minimum electric power output, the total cost, and the average cost of plants are analyzed.

During the heating period in Northeast China, the electricity generated by Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants has caused a large amount of wind power curtailment. To avoid this curtailment, Heat Storages (HS) and Electric Boilers (EB) are being widely applied to CHP plants. However, the effectiveness of HS and EB on the curtailment of wind power has still not been well evaluated. This paper proposes a new evaluation method consisting of an operation boundary model and an internal coordinated operation model for each flexible CHP plant with HS and EB. Then a system power balance model based on hour-by-hour analysis is established to determine the wind power integration, down-regulation subsidy and the utilization degree of the flexible equipment. The models are validated by using field measured data of a province in China. The results show that the capacity change of the EB has a bigger impact on the down-regulation subsidy than that of the HS, while the EB is more effective when the level of wind power integration is high.

This paper focuses on the provincial integrated energy system in northern China, which is characterized by the large-scale integration of renewable energy, thorough coupling of electricity and heat, and interactive operation of sources, loads, and storages. When conducting time-series production simulation with the daily rolling optimization dispatching method, the embedded daily optimal dispatching model fails to effectively charge and discharge electric and thermal energy storages across days to accommodate the curtailed electricity from renewable energy. Thus, a new embedded daily optimal dispatching model is proposed. The new model adopts a strategy of converting the stored energy of electric and thermal energy storages at the end of the dispatching day into equivalent coal consumption, respectively, and deducting it from the objective function of the optimal dispatching model. Through theoretical analysis, the reasonable range of the conversion coefficient is determined, enabling the model to use electric and thermal energy storages to store the curtailed electricity during surplus power generation in a dispatching day and accommodate it in subsequent days. A case study based on a provincial electricity–heat integrated energy system in northern China shows that the curtailment of renewable energy with the suggested strategy is much less than that with the traditional strategy, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed model.

In view of the frequency regulation (FR) policy in Northeast China, a two-stage real-time rolling optimization model for power plants participating in FR ancillary services is established. The optimization object of the first stage is to maximize the overall profitability of the power plant and to obtain FR performance sub-indicators (K₁, K₂, K₃) and the electric power curve of combined heat and power (CHP) units with energy storage. The second stage of the model performs load distribution with the objective of minimizing operating cost, subject to the constraint of electric and heat power balance for CHP units and energy storage. Meanwhile, rolling optimization combined with dynamic correction is used to ensure the accuracy of the two-stage FR optimization model by updating the operating status of the CHP units and energy storage and reducing the prediction errors of the FR commands. The above models have been validated by actual case studies of a CHP plant in Northeast China. They can ensure the economic and sustainable operation of CHP units and energy storage, enabling the CHP plant to benefit in the FR ancillary services market. The models offer a useful reference for CHP enterprises in terms of FR.