Estimation of Joint Distribution of Demand and Available Renewables for Generation Adequacy Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces new statistical methods for estimating the joint distribution of demand and renewable energy availability, addressing data sparsity issues in generation adequacy risk assessments.

Contribution

It proposes an alternative to hindcast estimation by rescaling the marginal distribution of renewables based on demand, improving reliability of adequacy calculations.

Findings

Hindcast estimates suffer from high sampling uncertainty.

Rescaling marginal VG distribution reduces uncertainty.

Sensitivity analysis of VG-demand relationship is feasible.

Abstract

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in generation adequacy risk assessment, due to the need to include variable generation renewables within such calculations. This paper will describe new statistical approaches to estimating the joint distribution of demand and available VG capacity; this is required for the LOLE calculations used in many statutory adequacy studies, for example those of GB and PJM. The most popular estimation technique in the VG-integration literature is `hindcast', in which the historic joint distribution of demand and available VG is used as a predictive distribution. Through the use of bootstrap statistical analysis, this paper will show that due to extreme sparsity of data on times of high demand and low VG, hindcast results can suffer from sampling uncertainty to the extent that they have little practical meaning. An alternative estimation approach, in which a marginal distribution of available VG is rescaled according to demand level, is thus proposed. This reduces sampling uncertainty at the expense of the additional model structure assumption, and further provides a means of assessing the sensitivity of model outputs to the VG-demand relationship by varying the function of demand by which the marginal VG distribution is rescaled.