{"id":954,"date":"2019-05-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/grid-capacity\/954\/"},"modified":"2020-09-07T13:16:52","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T12:16:52","slug":"grid-capacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/grid-capacity\/954\/","title":{"rendered":"Poweralliance: doubling of grid capacity on the medium voltage level"},"content":{"rendered":"
In order to mitigate the risks of climate change, an extensive energy system decarbonisation has to be made a reality by the middle of this century. With high renewable generation installation rates, this system will increasingly experience excess power production as long as competitive storage systems are lacking. As a consequence, renewable generation needs to be switched off more often. The reason for this is not only the temporarily insufficient electricity demand but also grid congestion on all voltage levels.<\/p>\n
Flexible electricity demand is needed, but demand shifts towards times of abundant wind and solar generation is practically not happening today. Power demand is inelastic due to technical, regulatory, and economical hurdles. With the progression of sector coupling, e.g. the electrification of transport and heating, this situation will change fundamentally. But increasing electrification will also see increased grid congestion as well, which in turn calls for costly grid upgrades.<\/p>\n
It is of the utmost importance that electrical energy supply in comparison with fossil energy carriers are not burdened with associated costs as much as they are today. Grid costs, taxes, and levies need to be lowered in order to make electrification economically attractive.<\/p>\n
Poweralliance creates additional distribution capacity in the existing physical grid while applying dynamic grid tariffication and price optimisation of flexible demand. The additional distribution capacity is made available by using the existing redundant grid capacity in the mid and high voltage grid which provides today\u2019s high level of security of supply (so-called \u2018n-1 security\u2019). Poweralliance guarantees that the security of supply for crucial consumers or processes (so-called \u2018unconditional loads\u2019) in the grid is never compromised.<\/p>\n
In addition to the standard tariff for unconditional loads, which follows a \u2018business-as-usual\u2019 logic, a new tariff, the significantly lower \u2018Poweralliance tariff\u2019, is introduced for flexible demand (so-called \u2018conditional loads\u2019). It is intended to be applied for new grid loads within the scope of sector coupling and storage as well as for renewable power generation. In most cases, these capacities do not require the n-1 security of supply, but can economically and technically better cope with grid outages.<\/p>\n
Figure 1 shows that the 100% physical grid capacity at a given bottleneck in the mid voltage grid can be split into a capacity band reserved for unconditional loads (a production line in the auto industry and a residual physical band, for instance) which can be used for conditional loads (such as price-driven power-to-heat and power-to-gas application, and batteries etc. for industrial use).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In order to demonstrate the feasibility and the practical use of the Poweralliance principle, a 15 minute simulation for daily schedules was executed over a one year period in 2035.
\nFigure 2 shows two resulting schedules which the grid customer sends to the DSO operator on a daily basis in order to have them approved or, eventually, declined (only in case of conditional loads). The schedules are a result of the following operation by the customer:
\nn Schedule of conditional load based on day ahead spot price signal (upper band)
\nn Schedule of unconditional load based on e.g. planned production schedule (lower band)
\nThe negative schedule in Figure 2 signifies power being fed back to the grid by the customer.<\/p>\n