Research project funded by ARPA-E

The increasing role of renewable energy sources is challenging grid operations, which have traditionally relied on highly predictable load and generation. Future grid operations must balance generation costs and system-level risk, shifting from deterministic to stochastic optimization and risk management. The Risk-Aware Market Clearing (RAMC) project will provide a blueprint for an end-to-end, data-driven approach where risk is explicitly modeled, quantified, and optimized, striking a trade-off between cost and system-level risk minimization. The RAMC project focuses on challenges arising from increased stochasticity in generation, load, flow interchanges with adjacent markets, and extreme weather. RAMC addresses these challenges through innovations in machine learning, sampling, and optimization. Starting with the risk quantification of each individual asset obtained from historical data, RAMC learns the correlations between the performance and risk of individual assets, optimizes the selection of asset bundles, and quantifies the system-level risk.