Generation & transmission adequacy of large interconnected power systems: A contribution to the renewal of Monte-Carlo approaches

For the last ten years, the European electricity market has been fast evolving, institutional moves being conjugated with new technological options and environmental concerns. This paves the way for wider techno-economic studies regarding generation as well as transmission. RTE, who establishes every two years a generation adequacy report circumscribed to the French perimeter, has developed a new tool for probabilistic studies (Antares) designed to be able to work at a much larger scale. This tool is a sequential Monte-Carlo simulator that connects a market model (minimization of the system´s operating costs) to Time-Series generators (stochastic processes simulators) that define the technical and meteorological assumptions to use along the 8760-hour frame of each Monte-Carlo year. The growing importance of intermittent generation explains why the relevant generators were paid special attention. Antares has so far been successfully used in a number of regional studies carried out in cooperation with members of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E).