Balancing reserve procurement and operation in the presence of uncertainty and transmission limits

With the ongoing changes in the European electricity production portfolio towards more renewable energy sources, the dispatch flexibility has decreased and operational uncertainty, due to intermittent generation has increased. At the same time, the grid infrastructure is operated at its limits. This leads to an increased risk of contingencies. As investments in new grid infrastructure is often a tedious process, methods to improve the usage of the existing infrastructure are of importance. In this paper we present an approach for the procurement and operation of manually activated control reserves, such as tertiary control reserves, also considering HVDC interconnections. We formulate probabilistic power flows based on PTDF and correlated distributions of intermittent infeeds and quantify the operational flexibility needs for every transmission line. The proposed methods consider these flexibility needs and procure and operate the reserves and HVDC connections accordingly. The efficacy of the methodology is demonstrated in case studies and it is shown, that the risk of contingencies is reduced.