Dealing with intermittent generation in the long-term evaluation of system adequacy and operational reserve requirements in the Iberian peninsula

Abstract

Even in a liberalized environment, managing the security of supply associated to the generating system continues to be a major task of the System Operators. The increased use of renewable energy, in particular wind power, adds new challenges to the process, namely in countries like Portugal and Spain, where strong investments in wind power have been done and are foreseen for the next years. In order to tackle this issue, REN (the Portuguese TSO), REE (the Spanish TSO) and INESC Porto (a RandD institute) joined together to develop a project where Monte Carlo simulation is used to evaluate the risk associated with specific future configurations of the generating system, until the horizon of 2025, in the framework of medium and long term generation planning of MIBEL (the Iberian electricity market). Probabilistic simulation was chosen because deterministic approaches to this problem, although simple to understand and easy to implement, are unable to tackle the complex relations between different uncertain variables. In this project, simulation is organized chronologically, in order to preserve the relations between load and the different variables associated to generation and produce meaningful risk indices of generation adequacy. A new feature is the analysis of the operational reserve, through a process that estimates, in each simulated state, the unforeseen change in load and wind generation. These unexpected changes are then compared with the total available operational reserve, defined by the secondary reserve plus the tertiary reserve units with lead time up to one hour. It is important to point out that the proposed simulation is a tool that is able to quantify the adequacy of different reserve requirements, solutions for reserve enhancement, etc. , in order to support the decision making process. This paper describes the concepts and assumptions of the simulation model and presents results and conclusions of some of the case studies carried out in the project.