Cross-border Balancing Research Articles

Market Equilibria in Cross-Border Balancing Platforms

Market Equilibria in Cross-Border Balancing Platforms

The impact of the establishment of the cross-border balancing market on the integration of RES into the regional electricity grid

The impact of the establishment of the cross-border balancing market on the integration of RES into the regional electricity grid

Integration of European Electricity Balancing Markets

Achieving a fully integrated energy market under the EU electricity target model constitutes an ongoing process. Given that the integration of spot markets is already at a mature stage, the next step forward is the successful integration of the balancing markets across European control areas. An analytical review of all the aspects governing the European balancing market integration is presented in this paper, providing a detailed description on the European regulatory framework on this topic. In addition, the design variables that need to be harmonized among national balancing markets as well as the available balancing market arrangements for the exchange of cross-border balancing services are presented. Numerical examples of the essence of the balancing market integration are provided, and the implementation projects initiated by European transmission system operators (TSOs) towards this direction are described. The review concludes that balancing market integration may indeed lead to a significant reduction in the balancing costs for the participating control areas, but further effort is still required to move from a regional level to a European-wide real-time balancing market, so that the whole potential of such a new landscape is revealed to the benefit of end-consumers.

Balancing potential of natural variability and extremes in photovoltaic and wind energy production for European countries

The increasing use of wind and solar power requires interventions to balance the associated variability in energy production. One option to reduce the costly interventions is to exploit the natural de-correlation of wind and irradiance. This study characterises the balancing potential of the natual variability in wind and photovoltaic energy production within and across eleven European countries. We use 20 years of highly resolved meteorological data from a post-processed regional reanalysis with a 6 km horizontal grid to calculate daily photovoltaic and wind power. Our results suggest a country-dependent reduction of the day-to-day variability in energy production by 29%–42% due to installing both PV and wind power capacities, compared to wind power only. The optimized photovoltaic to photovoltaic plus wind power generation ratios are 45–57% for maximizing balancing effects associated with the changing weather. We further identify on less than 10% of the days a simultaneous occurrence of extremes in photovoltaic and wind power across European countries. The cross-border balancing potentials for the extremes in renewable energy production are therefore high due to the spatio-temporal differences of the local weather.

Impact of tertiary reserve sharing in Portugal

Ancillary services play a fundamental role in the operation of electricity systems. In the Iberian Peninsula, since mid-2014, ancillary services have gained a transnational dimension, namely through the introduction of cross-border balancing replacement reserves between the Portuguese and the Spanish Transmission System Operators (TSOs). This paper evaluates the impact of replacement reserves on the Portuguese electricity system, from the onset of this mechanism until the end of 2017, as a new contribution to earlier studies. It also describes the pecuniary impact of tertiary transactions, the identification, and categorization of possible different scenarios of tertiary mobilization, and the respective impact on the internal tertiary mobilization. On the one hand, the Iberian electricity system is one of the most influenced by a high penetration of intermittent renewables, and therefore one of the best candidates to experience increased benefits from the platform. On the other hand, the Portuguese TSO is one of the most peripheral TSOs in Europe that benefits more from the market integration in various dimensions of the electricity sector.

Utilising demand response in the future Finnish energy system with increased shares of baseload nuclear power and variable renewable energy

The research presented in this paper aims to assess the technical effectiveness of demand response as a demand-side flexibility option to mitigate variability in the energy system in Finland in 2030. The results show that heating loads can provide a significant long-term technical potential for demand-side resource capacity. This demand-side resource capacity is not always available, as it varies according to the season and time of the day. The temporal availability of demand-side resource capacities varies between 80 and 5600 MW. Furthermore, the results show that the utilisation of demand-side resource capacity decreases significantly when the shifting time interval becomes more constrained. The utilisation of demand-side resource capacity results in balancing of residual demand in the day-ahead market, and thus more efficient utilisation of wind power generation in the Finnish power market. This smoothing effect reduces operating hours of thermal power production and the need for cross-border balancing by electricity imports during the peak hours. According to the sensitivity analysis, the ramping occurrences of district heating CHP units increase significantly with increased share of inflexible baseload nuclear power, while some of the efficiency gains can leak to the neighbouring countries.

Cross-Border Exchange and Sharing of Generation Reserve Capacity

This paper develops a stylized model of cross-border balancing. We distinguish three degrees of cooperation: autarky, reserves exchange and reserves sharing. The model shows that TSO cooperation reduces costs. The gains of cooperation increase with cost asymmetry and decrease with correlation of real-time imbalances. Based on actual market data of reserves procurement of positive and negative automatic frequency restoration reserves in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, we estimate the procurement cost decrease of exchange to be €165 million per year without transmission constraints and €135 million per year with transmission constraints. The cost decrease of sharing is estimated to be €500 million per year. The model also shows that voluntary cross-border cooperation could be hard to achieve, as TSOs do not necessarily have correct incentives.

The eBADGE approach to an intelligent pan-European balancing mechanism

eBADGE is a European research project co-funded under the 7th Framework Programme and aiming at proposing an intelligent pan-European balancing mechanism also able to integrate bidding from Virtual Power Plant Systems (VPPs) by means of an integrated “smart” communication infrastructure. In order to achieve this goal, the first step (described in the present paper) consists in studying optimal mechanisms of a cross-border balancing market optimizing the allocation of the cross-border transmission network capacities and suitable to incorporate bids from VPPs located on the distribution network. In parallel, opportune communication infrastructure characteristics able to allow its implementation are studied as well. Finally, a pilot simulator is developed for a region encompassing Austria, Italy and Slovenia allowing to analyze different implementation details and to appraise the economical convenience of a cross-border exchange of balancing resources as well as the ICT needs for its implementation. Methodology and approach are designed so as not to limit the scope to the region studied into the pilot, but permitting a gradual extension to wider regions of Europe. The simulator will be implemented in a “cloud” environment allowing to experiment a distributed participation in the three countries object of the study.The paper starts from an overview of aims and methodologies of the eBADGE project and then focuses on the issue of creating a cross-border balancing market. First, the regulatory background is clarified and then the modeling approach is illustrated in detail. First results, calculated on the basis of historical bids for the three investigated countries, are shown. These results give a rough idea of the economic advantage that the system could draw from a shared balancing market management.

An analysis of design options for markets for cross-border balancing of electricity

A set of design variables is used to define balancing market design. Performance criteria are defined and the market designs are evaluated using weights and scores for each performance criterion. It is concluded that solutions based on trading between Balancing Service Providers and Transmission System Operators will reduce socio-economic welfare. Major causes for this result are a reduction of the effectiveness of the balancing markets, a reduction in balancing planning accuracy, a reduction in price efficiency and a decrease in dynamic efficiency. The designs with a Common Merit Order List perform well in the evaluation, although reservation of cross-border capacity will be a challenge.