engleski

Comparison of Different Power Plant Clustering Approaches for Modeling Future Power Systems

Power system’s operational flexibility represents its ability to respond to unpredictable and unexpected changes in generation or demand. Traditional policy and planning models in most cases do not take in to the account the technical operating constraints that are directly responsible for its operational flexibility. Nevertheless, this capability becomes increasingly important with the integration of significant amounts of renewables (>=25%) whose intermittent nature is directly responsible for the decreased flexibility inherent in low-carbon generation technologies. Incorporating flexibility can significantly change optimal generation strategies, lower total system costs and improve policy impact estimates. The goal of this research is to prove that for computational efficiency reasons, it is useful to cluster some of the original units into larger ones. This process reduces the number of continuous and binary variables and can, in some conditions, be performed without significant loss of simulation accuracy. For these purposes a unit commitment and power dispatch model named Dispa-SET that focuses on the balancing and flexibility problems in the European grids has been applied to the Western Balkans power system. Two clustering options are available inside the model. MILP formulation aggregates very small or very flexible units into larger ones with averaged characteristics. LP formulation additionally simplifies the mathematical formulation by neglecting minimum up and down times, start-up costs and minimum stable loads. Preliminary results have shown that the difference between disaggregated and clustered approaches is almost negligible and falls within 15 % margin. This is especially true for highly interconnected regional systems with relatively high shares of hydro energy that is till now still the best flexibility option available for balancing out the renewables.

power system flexibility, clustering

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