Power-based modelling of renewable variability in dispatch models with clustered time periods

Abstract

The planning of future power systems with high shares of renewable generation requires modelling large and complex systems over long time periods, resulting in models which are computationally heavy to solve. For this reason methods that can be used to decrease the size of power system dispatch models are needed. A common method in large scale planning models is to decrease the model size by increasing the size of the time steps. However, using larger time steps makes the representation of variability of renewable generation and load less accurate, which can affect the results from the model. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to use a power-based version of an economic dispatch model to decrease the model time resolution while getting results which are close to the original high-resolution model. We implement both power-based and the conventional, energy-based, versions of a dispatch model with different time resolutions, and show that the power-based model has better agreement with the high-resolution model, especially as the model time step increases. For example, using the power-based model gives more accurate results for wind power curtailment in a high-renewable scenario.