New publication of the chair in Zeitschrift für Ener­giewirtschaft

We are pleased to announce publication of a new article in the field of energy resource planning in collaboration with Prof. Möst from the Chair of Energy Economics. The article Ramping constraint formulations under consideration of reserve activation in Unit Commitment Problems is published in Zeitschrift für Energiewirtschaft and is available online:

Abstract

Recently, the European Commission passed the Guideline on Electricity Balancing to standardize future reserve products in European electricity markets. Strict regulatory requirements are imposed on ramping behavior that must be adhered to, which brings ramping constraints into renewed focus. In a literature review, we find that prevalent ramping constraint formulations cannot guarantee that those regulatory requirements are fully satisfied. Since reserve activation in relation to ramping constraints is not discussed in literature, we aim to fill this research gap with a focus on the impact of reserve activation on ramping feasibility, availability of reserve, and thereby induced imbalances. We argue for the use of a simple, yet consequential and more robust, extended version of ramping constraints to account for intertemporal dependencies of reserve in general and to satisfy regulatory requirements in particular. Prevalent formulations significantly overestimate available reserve compared to the robust formulation. Worst-case bounds on the overestimation factor are provided for common operating modes. Computational experiments on standard benchmark sets confirm that the prevalent formulation overestimates reserve in realistic scenarios. Reserve activations are simulated from German data in a comprehensive ex-post analysis to identify reserve overestimation as a hitherto neglected source of imbalances and to quantify its extent.

Authors

Leopold Kuttner, Martin Scheffler, Udo Buscher, Dominik Möst