Martin Håberg

Earlier this year, I wrote an introduction to the bid filtering problem, and explained how my team at Statnett are trying to solve it. The system we’ve built at Statnett combines data from various sources in its attempt to make the right call. But how well is it doing its job? Or, more precisely, what is the effect on network congestion of applying our bid filtering system in its current form?

Without calling it a definitive answer, a paper I wrote for the CIGRE Symposium contains research results that provide new insight. The symposium was in Kyoto, but a diverse list of reasons (including a strict midwife) forced me to leave the cherry blossom to my imagination and test my charming Japanese phrases from a meeting room in Trondheim.

A quick recap

European countries are moving toward a new, more integrated way of balancing their power systems. In a country with highly distributed electricity generation, we want to automatically identify power reserves that should not be used in a given situation due to their location in the grid. If you would like to learn the details about the approach, you are likely to enjoy reading the paper. Here is the micro-version:

To identify bids in problematic locations, we need a detailed network model, we try to predict the future situation in the power grid, and then we apply a nodal market model which gives us the optimal plan for balancing activations for a specific situation. But since we don’t really know how much is going to flow into or out of the country, we optimize many times with different assumptions on cross-border flows. Each of the exchange scenarios tells its own story about which bids should -and shouldn’t- be activated. The scenarios don’t always agree, but in the aggregate they let us form a consensus result, determining which bids will be made unavailable for selection in the balancing market.

An unfair competition

Today, human operators at Statnett select power reserves for activation when necessary to balance the system, always mindful of their locations in the grid and potential bottlenecks. Their decisions on which balancing bids to activate – and not activate – often build years of operational experience and an abundance of real-time data.

Before discussing whether our machine can beat the human operators, it’s important to keep in mind that the bid filtering system will take part in a different context: the new balancing market, where everyday balancing will take place without the involvement of human operators. This will change the rules of the balancing game completely. While human operators constantly make a flow of integrated last-minute decisions, the new automatic processes are distinct in their separation of concerns and must often act much earlier to respect strict timelines.

Setting up simulations

The quantitative results in our paper come from simulating one day in the Norwegian power grid, using our detailed, custom-built Python model together with recorded data. The balancing actions -and the way they are selected- are different between the simulations.

The first simulation is Historical operation. Here, we simply replay the historical balancing decisions of the human operators.

The second simulation is Bid filtering. Here, we replace the historical human decisions with balancing actions selected by a zonal market mechanism that doesn’t see the internal network constraints or respect the laws of physics. The balancing decisions will often be different from the human ones in order to save some money. But before the market selects any bids, some of them are removed from the list by our bid filtering machine in order to prevent network congestion. We try not to cheat, the bid filtering takes place using data and forecasts available 30 minutes before the balancing actions take effect.

The third simulation is No filtering. Here we try to establish the impact on congestion of moving from today’s manual, but flexible operation to zonal, market-based balancing. This simulation is a parallel run of the market-based selection, but without pre-filtering any bids, and it provides a second, possibly more relevant benchmark.

*Example from 09:30 on August 25, 2021*. Red cells are balancing bids made unavailable in the bid filtering simulation. As a result, the market-based balancing will not select exactly the same bids in the Bid filtering scenario (black dots) and the No filtering scenario (white dots).

Power flow analyses

The interesting part of the simulation is when we inject the balancing decisions into the historical system state and calculate all power flows in the network. Comparing these flows to the operational limits reveals which balancing approaches are doing a better job at avoiding overloads in the network.

*Example from 09:30 on August 25, 2021* showing reliability limits. Reliability limits in Norway restrict the flow on a combination of transmission lines, so-called Power Transfer Corridors (PTCs). These 13 PTC constraints are violated in one or more of the simulations.

The overloads are similar between the simulation, but they are not the same. To better understand the big picture, we created a congestion index that summarizes the resulting overload situation in a single value. The number doesn’t have any physical interpretation, but gives a relative indication of how severe the overload situation is.

Congestion index for reliability limits in the Norwegian system from August 25, 2021

When we run the simulation for 24 historical hours, we see that with market-based balancing, there would be overloads throughout the day. When we apply bid filtering and remove the bids expected to be problematic, overloads are reduced in 9 of the 24 hours, and we’re able to avoid the most serious problems in the afternoon.

No matter the balancing mechanism, the congestion index virtually never touches zero. Even the human operators with all their extra information and experience run into many of the same congestion problems. This shows that balancing activations play a role in the amount of congestion, but they are just one part of the story, along with several other factors.

With that in mind, if you’re going to let a zonal market mechanism decide your balancing decisions, it seems that bid filtering can have a clear, positive effect in reducing network overloads.

What do you think? Do you read the results differently? Don’t be afraid to get in touch, my team and I are always happy to discuss.

ありがとうございました

Together with almost half of the Data science group at Statnett, I spend my time building automatic systems for congestion management. This job is fascinating and challenging at the same time, and I would love to share some of what our cross-functional team has done so far. But before diving in, let me first provide some context.

A good day at Statnett’s control centre. Photo: Trond Isaksen

The balancing act

Like other European transmission system operators (TSOs), Statnett is keeping the frequency stable at 50 Hz by making sure generation always matches consumption. The show is run by the human operators in Statnett’s control centre. They monitor the system continuously and instruct flexible power producers or consumers to increase or decrease their power levels when necessary.

These balancing adjustsments are handled through a balancing energy market. Flexible producers and consumers offer their reserve capacity as balancing energy bids (in price-volume pairs). The operators select and and activate as many of them as needed to balance the system. To minimize balancing costs, they try to follow the price order, utilizing the least expensive resources first.

While busy balancing the system, control centre operators also need to keep an eye on the network flows. If too much power is injected in one location, the network will be congested, meaning there are overloads that could compromise reliable operation of the grid. When an operator realizes a specific bid will cause congestion, she will mark it as unavailable and move on to use more expensive bids to balance the system.

In the Norwegian system, congestion does not only occur in a few well-known locations. Due to highly distributed generation and a relatively weak grid, there are hundreds of network constraints that could cause problems, and the Norwegian operators often need to be both careful and creative when selecting bids for activation.

A filtering problem

The Nordic TSOs are transitioning to a new balancing model in the upcoming year. A massive change is that balancing bids will no longer be selected by humans, but by an auction-like algorithm, just as in many other electricity markets. This algorithm (unfortunately, but understandably) uses a highly aggregated zonal structure, meaning that it will consider capacity restrictions between the 12 Nordic bidding zones, but not within them.

Consequently, the market algorithm will disregard all of the more obscure (but still important) intra-zonal constraints . This will -of course- lead to market results that simply do not fit inside the transmission grid, and there is neither time nor opportunity after the market clearing to modify the outcome in any substantial way.

My colleagues and I took the task of creating a bid filtering system. This means predicting which bids would cause congestion, and mark them as unavailable to prevent them from being selected by the market algorithm.

Filtering the correct bids is challenging. Network congestions depend on the situation in the grid, which is anything but constant due to variations in generation, consumption, grid topology and exchange with other countries. The unavailability decision must be made something like 15-25 minutes before the bid is to be used, and there is plenty of room for surprises during that period.

How it works

Although I enjoy discussing the details, I will give a only a short summary of the system works. To decide the availability of each bid in the balancing market, we have created a Python universe with custom-built libraries and microservices that follows these steps

Assemble a detailed model of the Norwegian power system in its current state. Here, we combine the grid model from Statnett’s equpment database and combine it with fresh data from Statnett’s SCADA system.
Adjust the model to reflect the expected state.
Since we are looking up to 30 minutes ahead, we offset the effect of current balancing actions, and apply generation schedules and forecasts to update all injections in the model.
Prepare to be surprised.
To make more robust decisions in the face of high uncertainty in exchange volumes, we even apply a hundred or more scenarios representing different exchange patterns on the border.
Find the best balancing actions for each scenario of the future.
Interpreting the results of an optimal power flow calculation provides lots of insight into which bids should be activated (and which should not) in each exchange scenario.
Agree on a decision.
In the final step, the solution from each scenario is used to form a consensus decision on which bids to make unavailable for the balancing market algorithm.

An example result and how to read it

My friend and mentor Gerard Doorman recently submitted a paper for the 2022 CIGRE session in Paris, explaining the bid filtering system in more detail. I will share one important figure here to illustrate the final step of the bid filtering method. The figure shows the simulated result of running the bid filtering system at 8 AM on August 23, 2021.

Simulated bid filtering results from August 23, 2021. Bids are sorted horizontally, according to price, and grouped by their bidding zone (NO1 through 5) and direction (up/down).

Before you cringe from information overload, let me assist you by explaining that the abundance of green cells in the horizontal bar on top shows that the vast majority of balancing bids were decided to be available.

There are also yellow cells, showing bids that likely need to be activated to keep the system operating within its security limits, no matter what happens.

The red cells are bids that have been made unavailable to prevent network congestion. To understand why, we need to look at the underlying results in the lower panel. Here, each row presents the outcome of one scenario, and purple cells show the bids that were rejected, i.e. not activated in the optimal solution, although being less expensive than other ones that were activated for balancing in the same scenario (in pink).

The different scenarios often do not tell the same story, a bid that is rejected in one scenario can be perfectly fine in the next, it all depends on the situation in the grid and which other bids are also activated. Because of this ambiguity, business rules are necessary to create a reasonable aggregate result, and the final outcome will generally be imperfect.

So, does this filtering system have any postive impact on network congestions at Statnett? I will leave the answer for later, but if you’re curious to learn more, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.