Cross-Border Exchange in long-term scenarios

[Clement]

Dear openmod community,

I would need your help or tips when it comes to cross-border exchange for long-term studies, for example 2050 Net-Zero pathways.

I am wondering what is the most scientific/common way to deal with power flow between modeled countries and exogoneous countries. This would for example be Germany and Poland if you consider only CWE.

I understand that the easiest way to deal with this is to include as much countries as possible in your optimization so that you get the whole sychronous area, but you might still have border issue and it’s not always possible depeding on your refinment. Does any of you know what would be best (consider historical exchanges, dismiss them totally) or have a methodology on this point ?

Thanks for your help, happy to discuss.
Clément.

[robbie.morrison]

Note: The original version of the question was framed in terms of “power exchange” but later revised to “power flow” — hence the following answer relates to a rather different topic, but I’ll leave my response here anyway.

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I’ll let others discuss the merits of modeling prices versus costs and how best to generate bids for the former — especially around the year 2050.

What I will comment on is the availability of historical power exchange (PX) information. This information is supposed to be under statutory reporting but the power exchanges go to considerable effort to prevent it being recovered and used for research. For some leads, please see:

• Morrison, Robbie (30 May 2020). Submission on a European strategy for data with an emphasis on energy sector datasets — Release 08. Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

And in particular:

• search on “Instrat” for information on Polish markets
• see section 5.3 which covers the behavior of the PXs

Also check the following sites for Poland and Germany respectively (all data on the SMARD site is licensed CC‑BY‑4.0):

• http://energy.instrat.pl  (and select English)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_energy_system_databases#SMARD
• https://www.smard.de

Note too the new 2019/1024 open data directive, now in force, also contains provisions for text and data mining (TDM) for the purposes of scientific research and these provisions might be of interest when dealing with the PX sites:

• European Commission (26 June 2019). “Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information — PE/28/2019/REV/1”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 172: 56–83.

Finally there might be something of interest in Hirth (2020) as well, including lists of information sources and their terms of use:

• Hirth, Lion (1 January 2020). “Open data for electricity modeling: legal aspects”. Energy Strategy Reviews. 27: 100433. ISSN 2211-467X. doi:10.1016/j.esr.2019.100433.

[matteodefelice]

Dear Clement,
my two cents on this topic. As usual when dealing with modelling, the best answer is “it depends…”. What is your goal? Do you want to simulate a single area or rather you want to analyse the entire continent? Also, how important is the specific power flow? I would look at the current situation and assess how important it is in terms of volumes and then I would assume how important will be in the future scenario. From my point of view, the exogenous power flows are part of the assumptions you make for your modelling exercise: so you can say, “I assume that the power exchange between Finland and Russia will be negligible in 2050”. There cannot be any consensus on this, we all agree that the more the better but we don’t have enough resources (computing, time) and data to fill all the gaps.