Aggregation Methods for Modelling Hydropower and Its Implications for a Highly Decarbonised Energy System in Europe

Abstract

Given the pursuit of long-term decarbonisation targets, future power systems face the task of integrating the renewable power and providing flexible backup production capacity. Due to its general ability to be dispatched, hydropower offers unique features and a backup production option not to be neglected, especially when taking the flexibility potential of multireservoir systems into account. Adequate hydropower representations are a necessity when analysing future power markets and aggregation methods are crucial for overcoming computational challenges. However, a major issue is that the aggregation must not be a too flexible representation. In a first step, a novel equivalent hydro system model implementation including a possibility to integrate pumping capacity and appropriate handling of multiple water paths (hydraulic coupling) by making use of an ex-ante optimisation is proposed. In a second step, a clustered equivalent hydro system model implementation employing k-means clustering is presented. A comparison of both aggregation approaches against the detailed reference system shows that both aggregated model variants yield significant reductions in computation time while keeping an adequate level of accuracy for a highly decarbonised power system scenario in Europe. The aggregation methods can easily be applied in different model types and may also be helpful in the stochastic case.

Interaction of Energy Storage Technologies and Synthetic Fuels in Long-Term Decarbonization Scenarios

“…Additionally, temporally and spatially high-resolution time series for the feedin of wind energy and PV are included. The European hydrological power plant park is modeled with historical inflow data for running water, storage water and pumped hydro storage power plants [18].…”

Inflow Aggregation and Run-of-the-River Inflow Energy for Reducing Dimensionality in the Long-Term Generation Scheduling Problem

“…The hydro function production (HPF) is represented in a simplified manner to prioritize the representation of inflows, i.e., the PAR model for each plant. In turn, in [7], an aggregated system with four Energy Equivalent Reservoirs (EER) [17] is used to represent the hydroelectric plants in the LTGS problem associated with the Brazilian power system. This simplification allows using the PAR model, which addresses the bootstrap [18] methodology for calculating the energy inflow residuals.…”

“…Particularly for systems with a predominance of water resources, the main object of simplification is the HPF, a nonlinear and nonconvex multidimensional function [1]. In general, the works opt to represent HPF via an EER [17], an individualized model with constant productivity [23], or with minor corrections in power according to the head [24]. However, the literature lacks this trade-off, i.e., finding a balance between stochastic inflow modeling and the physical representation of the problem.…”

“…On the other hand, the RoR inflow energy [7], [17], [26] is used as a state variable associated with the plants without storage capacity. The strategies for building the RoR inflow energy model and the individual distribution in each LP in SDDP are the same as employed in inflow aggregation.…”

Construction Diversion Risk Assessment for Hydropower Development on Sediment-Rich Rivers

“…Hydropower is an important part of global renewable energy [1][2][3], which not only supports regional power supply but also helps to achieve decarburization targets [4,5]. Hydropower contributes to balance the power production variability of other kinds of renewable energy, like wind or solar power, because hydropower supply is relatively steadier and has good adaptability [6][7][8].…”