Offshore Electricity Infrastructure in Europe - European Wind Energy ...

C.II Power market and flow
model
The power market and power flow model simulates the
operation of the power system based on a detailed set
of European generation data (capacity, costs etc.) and
a detailed European grid model. This allows the assessment
of system operation costs, and the possible
benefits by e.g. installing an extra interconnector.
The model used for the flow-based power market simulations
is a Matlab-based collection of classes and
functions referred to as the SINTEF Power System
Simulation Tool (PSST) [2]. It is an updated version of
the model used by SINTEF in the IEE project TradeWind.
PSST combines a market model with a model of the
European electricity grid. The model assumes a perfect
market with nodal pricing. The socio-economic
FiGuRe 12.4: Gis cable ROutinG
OffshoreGrid – Final Report
optimum for the overall European electricity production
is found by minimising the total yearly generation
cost. From the simulations both technical and economic
parameters, such as generation cost, energy
prices, price differences and grid utilisation (off- and
on-shore) for different scenarios can be extracted.
The optimal generation dispatch is computed on hourly
basis and the power flow through the electricity grid
is linearly approximated (DC power flow [12][13]). In
more technical terms, the optimal solution for each
hour is found by minimising a cost function that essentially
expresses the cost of generation, with different
marginal generation costs for different countries and
generator types. The power flow is constrained by the
grid capacity on individual branch level and on international
interconnections. This is fed as mathematical
constraint into the optimisation problem.
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