Flow-based market coupling in the Central Western European region: on the eve of implementation

摘要

The European target model for the Electricity market in 2014 is a single European price coupling forthe day-ahead market. At the core of this single European price coupling, is the targeted coordinatedcapacity calculation by the TSOs. The coordinated capacity calculation process shall encompass thefollowing steps:1. Setting up individual TSO’s base cases (grid models),2. Merging of these individual files into a European-wide common grid model,3. Capacity calculation, on a regional basis,4. Validation of the results, to ensure the feasibility of the calculated capacities.By optimizing the capacity calculation and allocation, the target model aims at promoting marketintegration, facilitating the European market functioning and efficiency, and improving the Europeansocial welfare while guaranteeing the Security of Supply.In Central Western Europe (CWE) - a region consisting of the Netherlands, Belgium, France,Luxembourg, and Germany - a single price coupling was launched successfully as of November 9,2010. At the origin of this market coupling (MC) process lies a coordinated ATC capacity calculationmethod that was designed and implemented by the CWE TSOs. For several years now, the CWETSOs have been working on the ‘next-step’ coordinated capacity calculation method, the 'flow-basedmethodology' (FB), and reported on their work in 2008 [1]. The methodology, that was still in atheoretical stage at that time, has evolved by extensive experimentation and some theoreticalimprovements, and is now ‘operationalized’. This means that the implementation of a flow-basedmarket coupling (FBMC) in CWE, as a next ®evolutionary step in the European market integration,is now envisaged [2].In this paper, the CWE TSOs present the developments made since their CIGRE paper in 2008; thetheory of the FB mechanism itself will not be touched upon as it is addressed in depth in [1].The focusin the paper is first on the properties of the FB capacity domain and the advantages that it bringscompared to the ATC approach. This will be done not only from a theoretical perspective, but thetheoretical claims will be proven on the basis of experimentally acquired results as well. Thereafter,the questions how remedial actions could be precisely taken into account during the capacitycalculation process (using explicit remedial actions), and how to quantify the uncertainty, that theTSOs are faced with in the day-ahead market coupling, in the FB mechanism, are addressed.