Sharing Reserves through HVDC: Potential Cost Savings in the Nordic Countries

TL;DR

This paper explores how HVDC links can provide fast reserves to reduce security costs in the Nordic power system, showing potential for significant cost savings by using HVDC for frequency support.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative tool for mitigation strategies and evaluates the economic benefits of HVDC-based fast reserves in the Nordic grid.

Findings

Using HVDC for frequency support could reduce security costs by 70%.

The frequency of redispatching actions is projected to increase in the future.

Economic benefits of HVDC reserves are significant across 2018, 2020, and 2025.

Abstract

During summer 2018, the Nordic system's kinetic energy dropped below a critical level. As a consequence, Svenska kraftn\"{a}t, the Swedish transmission system operator (TSO), requested the largest production unit to reduce its power output to guarantee system's security. This action resulted in a deviation from the generation dispatch determined by the market and in high costs for the Nordic TSOs. In this regard, this paper presents a tool for comparing mitigation strategies from an economic point of view and evaluates potential economic benefits of utilizing the Emergency Power Control (EPC) functionality of HVDC lines for the provision of fast reserves as a compliment to Frequency Containment Reserves (FCR). Moreover, the analysis is extended to the years 2020 and 2025 using inertia estimations from the Nordic TSOs. The findings of the paper suggest that the frequency of redispatching actions will increase in the future and that the cost of security for Nordic TSOs could be reduced by 70\% if HVDC links are used for frequency support.