Estimating the Future Need of Balancing Power Based on Long-Term Power System Market Simulations

Abstract: With increasing penetration of variable renewable energy sources (vRES) and a higher rate of electrification in the society, there will be future challenges in maintaining a continuous balance between electricity supply and demand. To investigate the possibility of different technologies to provide balancing services, to dimension future balancing services and design technical requirements for future balancing services, the future need of balancing power must first be known. Future power systems are often analysed by performing simulations capturing the energy produced, consumed or transmitted for different power system components with resolution of one trading period (TP), here called TP energy simulations. However, these simulations do not fully capture the continuous intra-TP power balance that must be kept at every time instance. In this paper, we propose a model to perform high-resolution intra-TP simulations to estimate the need of balancing power based on TP energy simulations. The model is applied to the Swedish system operator (SO) Svenska kraftn\"at's TP energy simulations of a scenario with high vRES penetration and a highly electrified society in year 2045. The results show that a considerable need of balancing power will occur frequently, where faster ramping of components tend to increase the need of balancing power while assuming that the transmission reliability margin (TRM) is used to net imbalances clearly decreases the need of balancing power.