Towards a pan-European energy balancing market: Exercise on coupling the United Kingdom and Continental Europe

Increasing levels of wind power generation in the coming years will displace conventional generation, impacting the need for balancing reserves. The upcoming integration of pan-European balancing markets seeks to increase collaboration between areas for optimal provision of services. The challenge of increased variability due to wind and other renewables could be tackled by the exchange of balancing services among regional groups within the larger interconnected system. In this work, load-frequency control models of the United Kingdom and Continental Europe were developed in the MATLAB/Simulink environment and a worst-case event for the UK in the year 2020 is chosen for analysis. Fast control actions are then exchanged between the power systems of UK and Continental Europe. The performance of the coupled system in terms of frequency deviation is evaluated and compared to the decoupled situation. The results show that the frequency response improves, with lower maximum deviations. A cross-border balancing arrangement also leads to less deployment of reserves for UK.