  Renewable energy has attracted significant attention over the last decade,
conceivably due to its environmental benefits and the recent drops in the
development and deployment cost of the technology. The increase in renewable
generation, however, has resulted in new challenges in supply-load balancing,
owing to its intermittent, non-predictable and volatile generation features.
Several methods have been introduced to cope with negative impacts of the
renewable generation deployment. In this paper, a novel method, i.e., the
application of microgrids in capturing the variabilities of distributed
renewable generation in distribution networks is proposed and investigated.
Utilizing available flexibility of microgrids represents a local and viable
solution which leads to lower investments from electric utilities for
increasing their flexibility and providing more reserved power. It is
investigated that how the system flexibility requirements can be integrated
into the microgrid optimal scheduling model to enable microgrids in supporting
the grid operators by offering flexibility services. Using the proposed
flexibility constraints, intra-hour and inter-hour variabilities at the
distribution feeder will be efficiently captured. Numerical simulations on a
test distribution feeder, with one microgrid and several renewable-equipped
consumers, show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
