Value of regional constraint management services of vector-bridging systems in a heavily constrained network

Abstract

While a lot of countries put renewable energy sources at the heart of their decarbonization strategies with directed incentive mechanisms, the variability of the renewable energy sources, remains a major challenge for electricity system operators in ensuring the security of supply. This challenge is particularly onerous when there is a coincidence between this variability and congestion of the tie-lines. Renewable generation spillage often leads to constraints being placed on the output of renewable energy sources. This situation causes a significant cost for electricity system operators due to the need for constraint payments to be made to renewable generations. These increased costs will ultimately be recovered from energy customers. Maintaining the balance in the aforementioned decarbonization, security of supply and affordability is a challenge that constitutes the energy trilemma. The integration of electric power systems with other energy infrastructures, e.g., natural gas, could be a promising solution for achieving a balanced performance in the energy trilemma, controlling the fluctuation of renewable energy sources, and increasing the flexibility of the integrated systems. Considering this, a hybrid bridging-operational framework based on the vector-bridging system concept is proposed. Also, a day-ahead integrated scheduling model is proposed that optimizes the integrated operation by considering the constraint payment costs in a linear optimization model. Simulation results on a large test system indicated that the hybrid bridging-operational framework could reduce the total cost of the congested system by 65% and release up to 10% of the pipeline capacities while harvesting the wind generation and removing constraint payments to wind generators.