Balancing Contributions in the Nordic Electricity System : Who bears the brunt of electricity production and consumption patterns?

Sammanfattning: The share of intermittent weather-based renewable electricity sources has risen and will keep on rising in the Nordic electricity system, which will increase the need of balancing power in the Nordics. The previously developed concept of balancing contributions is used to look at the historic contribution of different power sources to the balancing on the grid. Three different time scales are taken into account: Daily variations, (bi-)weekly variations, and seasonal/yearly variations. This will aid in the understanding of the synergy of different sources on the grid, which, together with a deeper knowledge of the electricity market, might make it possible in the future to quantify the potential for balancing of sources within the Nordic grid. As a method to analyse the balancing contributions, a previously set-up online visualisation tool was used as an example, and this existing tool was revamped with a new software back-end using a database and automatic data collection. This allows one to be able to use a larger dataset, and for more functionality in the future, such as real-time updates and easier implementation of additional visualisations. Production and consumption data was gathered from Entso-e and SvK: the former has issues with data quality and the latter publishes data with a three-week delay which can only be obtained manually. The results from the previous research have been replicated, and a bigger dataset has been used to do the calculations, encompassing the years 2015-2018. The overall results show great similarity to that of the previous work. For the first time it was possible to plot the intrayear balancing contributions as a time series, which showed especially that the contributions of hydro power and electricity trade have changed over the period 2015-2018. There is a difference in hydro power balancing contributions based on geographical location, where Finnish hydro power is mainly a daily and—to a lesser extent—weekly regulator, Swedish hydro and especially Norwegian hydro have larger contributions on a yearly basis as well. There are even differences within countries, as the balancing contribution of hydro in bidding area SE2 has changed much more over time than hydro in SE1, for example. Other examples of interesting situations on the grid have also been highlighted using the online visualisation tool.