Reliability and efficiency at global level in power systems

In EU project E-Price it is proposed to attribute reliability to the Transmission System Operator (TSO) and the drive for efficiency to the Balance Responsible Parties (BRP). Two main ideas are proposed. The first idea is to make BRPs themselves responsible for estimating their uncertainty in real time and hedge their imbalance risks, yielding the proposal to introduce dual-sided markets for ancillary services. The second idea is to reduce the conservatism in exploiting the inter-area transmission capacity (ATC), while still guaranteeing sufficient degrees of reliability. This paper explains, elucidates and concludes, based on qualitative arguments and supported by quantitative simulations and calculations, that both proposals are beneficial to improve the stated compromise between reliability and economy.