Abstract
Large-scale entry of intermittent renewables needs to be balanced with a source of flexibility to retain generation adequacy. Storage offers such flexibility but sufficient capacities are currently available only indirectly via hydropower reservoirs. Yet hydropower is not insulated from adequacy concerns because reservoir levels also depend on the weather. This paper shows how to estimate the availability of intermittent renewables and long-term hydro storage from historic data with the use of modern regression techniques. The novelty of the paper is to introduce a robust methodology to add the estimated availability distributions directly to the computationally light and transparent recursive convolution approach; and the principles extend to other computational methods. An application to the Finnish power system makes it clear how both the short-term availability shocks from intermittent renewables and the long-term shocks from hydropower availability should be properly accounted for to avoid misguided generation adequacy estimates.
Highlights
One of the prominent ways to reduce greenhouse gases from power generation is the increase of renewables, solar and wind power in particular
This paper shows how to estimate the availability of intermittent renewables and longterm hydro storage from historic data with the use of modern regression techniques
An application to the Finnish power system makes it clear how both the short-term availability shocks from intermittent renewables and the long-term shocks from hydropower availability should be properly accounted for to avoid misguided generation adequacy estimates
Summary
One of the prominent ways to reduce greenhouse gases from power generation is the increase of renewables, solar and wind power in particular. Hydropower is not immune to availability problems of a different nature: While hydro is a flexible resource when there is water, droughts and other deviations from the expected inflows can lead to empty reservoirs that are of little use in the times of need. The second approach is to determine a fixed capacity value for the resource [8,9]. This leads to decreasing capacity value for the intermittent generation as its amount in the sys tem increases, putting the burden of adequacy solely to the entrants, not the incumbents. Simulation models are greatly improving, as in Tindemans and Strbac [13], but they may still appear as “black boxes” e.g. to regulators and they can be demanding to set up and operate in complex and rapidly evolving power systems; leading to a search for alternative approaches, e.g. [14]
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