Power flow tracing in a simplified highly renewable European electricity network

TL;DR

This paper applies power flow tracing to a simplified European renewable energy network to fairly allocate transmission costs based on actual power flow patterns, considering network structure and renewable variability.

Contribution

It introduces a flow tracing method for cost allocation in renewable-heavy power grids and demonstrates its application on a simplified European model.

Findings

Flow tracing provides fair cost allocation based on actual power flows.

The method accounts for network structure and renewable variability.

Application on a European model shows practical feasibility.

Abstract

The increasing transmission capacity needs in a future energy system raise the question how associated costs should be allocated to the users of a strengthened power grid. In contrast to straightforward oversimplified methods, a flow tracing based approach provides a fair and consistent nodal usage and thus cost assignment of transmission investments. This technique follows the power flow through the network and assigns the link capacity usage to the respective sources or sinks using a diffusion-like process, thus taking into account the underlying network structure and injection pattern. As a showcase, we apply power flow tracing to a simplified model of the European electricity grid with a high share of renewable wind and solar power generation, based on long-term weather and load data with an hourly temporal resolution.