Requirements of Future European Balancing Markets: Insights into Imbalance Volumes and Generation Availability.
Abstract
The share of Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) sources, especially wind and solar, is increasing in the European energy systems. Despite their environmental benefits, variability and forecast uncertainty caused by VRE technologies pose challenges in maintaining supply-demand balance. Yet, due to current electricity market construct, a major volume of VRE generation is transacted in day-ahead markets. The considerable temporal separation between the gate closures and actual delivery often results in forecast deviations. Thus, aggravating imbalances and leading to frequency fluctuations and price spikes of succeeding electricity markets. European system operators are integrating balancing markets to uphold adequate reserves to meet imbalances. Initiatives such as MARI and PICASSO are being developed as integrated market-clearing platforms for manual and automatic frequency estoration reserves. While it is evident that the integrated market clearing mechanisms help to ensure reserve sufficiency at optimal costs, it is equally important to comprehend the evolution of imbalance volumes and available generation capacity of future balancing markets. This can help in assessing balancing reserve requirements, in terms of volume and ramping, and underlying bottlenecks of capacity investment decisions. This paper focuses on such underlying aspects. The developed balancing tool chain in this work relies on the generator-level operational profiles, tie-line power flows, and hour-ahead VRE forecasts.
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Yamujala, S, Das, Kaushik, Koivisto, M, Gupta, M, and Kanellas, P. Requirements of Future European Balancing Markets: Insights into Imbalance Volumes and Generation Availability. In: 22nd Wind and Solar Integration Workshop. DOI: 10.1049/icp.2023.2749
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