Joint Working Group C2/C5.05, “Reliability standards and market rules related to maintaining reliability and market efficiency”.
Joint Working Group C2/C5.05 has recently published Technical Brochure 778, “Reliability standards and market rules related to maintaining reliability and market efficiency”. The Technical Brochure is intended to identify the challenges to system operators when they attempt to achieve power system operational reliability and market efficiency simultaneously, and manage the interactions between them. Australian members on the working group were Mark Miller and Greg Hesse.
Joint Working Group C2/C5.05, “Reliability standards and market rules related to maintaining reliability and market efficiency”.
The working group surveyed 11 countries / regions to identify the system operations processes as well as the electricity market processes that are adopted to maintain operating reliability. The survey was broken into three timeframes:
- Current time (real-time operations);
- Next day (next day operations planning); and
- Longer term (near-term operations planning – up to one year)
Australia was able to contribute two quite distinct perspectives representing the National Electricity market (NEM) in the east and south of the country, as well as the Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM) in Western Australia. Other respondents included Brazil, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Norway, Canada (Ontario), South Africa and USA (MISO and PJM).
Most operators have nation-wide or market-wide reliability standards which primarily relate to generation resource adequacy and transmission and distribution capability. It is interesting that only three respondents identified inertia requirements as a standard to be applied and the Australian NEM is the only one that specifies a system strength requirement.
Most markets have rules in place to enable the provision of resources to ensure reliability across all timeframes. In the longer-term timeframe this tends to be limited to identifying energy resource requirements, often including demand response elements. The closer to real-time operation the more different types of resources are identified and secured, such as operating reserves, ancillary services and firm transmission capacity. However, the longer the timeframe, the more flexibility and opportunity there is to utilize market mechanisms to meet reliability objectives.
The Technical Brochure highlights some new challenges to be addressed in the interaction between market rules and reliability standards:
- The increased penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) requires greater co-ordination between transmission and distribution system operators, including increased data exchange. Rules will need to provide a framework for harnessing the flexible resources available at both transmission and distribution levels to enhance reliability outcomes;
- The increasing use of inverter based resources and variable renewable energy sources present additional challenges. Frameworks for assessing and managing these new power system characteristics will be necessary.
On this last point, while Australia has been rapidly increasing these relatively new technologies, from a global perspective its power systems are relatively small in terms of maximum demand and yet cover huge distances. Australia, therefore, has much to offer the rest of world in the learnings gained from managing our power systems with reducing system strength.
The Technical Brochure is free to members and 90€ to non-members and can be downloaded at e-cigre HERE