Electricity Market Challenges under HVDC Multi Bipoles and Multi Vendors Environment: Experience Observations in Brazil - Topic: Market design and operation considerations in systems with significant HVDC

摘要

It is well known that in the 1990's and early 2000's, many countries faced deregulation, re-regulation, privatization, re-structuring processes aimed at reaching a higher level of service efficiency as well to improve the level of transparency and quality to the electricity consumers in order to provide suitable market signals to private investors. In parallel to that, a strong political incentive to increase the application of clean energy into the electricity markets applied to every country/region have contributed to change some paradigms of the electrical sectors worldwide. In this context, HVDC applications have found an important niche to widening its market space. What we may see, for instance in Europe, is a large amount of HVDC projects interconnecting countries by sea cables as well as, noteworthy examples of off-shore wind farms, in the current range of 800 MW each, being planned or connected to the main grids through HVDC schemes (mostly using VSC). Important initiatives from the European Community are taking place aiming at the establishment of viable DC Grids (DCG) arrangements. Although no Direct Current Grids (DCG) are operational yet, it has been speculated by many researchers that such grids will provide significant benefits beyond the integration of multiple offshore wind farms dispersed over wide areas into AC onshore grid. On the other hand, large dimensioned countries such as China, India and Brazil, have also offered an outstanding opportunity for HVDC market improvement, by establishing huge transmission trunks of ±600 kV and ±800 kV DC, 4000 MW to 8000 MW and transmission line lengths around 2000 km. The worldwide Electricity Markets reforms have been based considering that the transmission segment of the industry is mainly AC. This is a valid premise, due to the highly predominance of this alternative to interconnect the grids. However, as we nowadays face more and more HVDC projects - where a highly concentrated technological content is present, unpredictable and unforeseen aspects of market regulation do show up as challenging aspects to be faced by Regulators, Investors, Utilities and System Operators. The Brazilian experience has some particularities due to the Regulatory Framework established in the recent past of granting new transmission concessions through public auctions. In addition, the Brazilian ISO, the ONS, does not own any of the transmission assets. This has led to the creation of many Transmission Agents sharing the grid installations. This paper elaborates on the potential issues derived from the expansion of new HVDC projects, especially in Brazil, from the standpoint of describing and ranking key issues which have been faced by ONS, in particular, in the context of how market rules have been influencing and, also, affecting the Brazilian transmission expansion activity. Some of the solutions found and issues remained unresolved, or under discussion, will be described and highlighted in order to profit from constructive debates.