arXiv subjects

Bo Tranberg

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Tranberg.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

A graphical approach to carbon-efficient spot market scheduling for Power-to-X applications

In the Paris agreement of 2015, it was decided to reduce the CO2 emissions of the energy sector to zero by 2050 and to restrict the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degree Celcius above the pre-industrial level. Such commitments are possible only with practically CO2-free power generation based on variable renewable technologies. Historically, the main point of criticism regarding renewable power is the variability driven by weather dependence. Power-to-X systems, which convert excess power to other stores of energy for later use, can play an important role in offsetting the variability of renewable power production. In order to do so, however, these systems have to be scheduled properly to ensure they are being powered by low-carbon technologies. In this paper, we introduce a graphical approach for scheduling power-to-X plants in the day-ahead market by minimizing carbon emissions and electricity costs. This graphical approach is simple to implement and intuitively explain to stakeholders. In a simulation study using historical prices and CO2 intensity for four different countries, we find that the price and CO2 intensity tends to decrease with increasing scheduling horizon. The effect diminishes when requiring an increasing amount of full load hours per year. Additionally, investigating the trade-off between optimizing for price or CO2 intensity shows that it is indeed a trade-off: it is not possible to obtain the lowest price and CO2 intensity at the same time.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2020

Tracing carbon dioxide emissions in the European electricity markets

Consumption-based carbon emission measures aim to account for emissions associated with power transmission from distant regions, as opposed to measures which only consider local power generation. Outlining key differences between two different methodological variants of this approach, we report results on consumption-based emission intensities of power generation for European countries from 2016 to 2019. We find that in particular for well connected smaller countries, the consideration of imports has a significant impact on the attributed emissions. For these countries, implicit methodological choices in the input-output model are reflected in both hourly and average yearly emission measures.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Short-term CO2 emissions forecasting based on decomposition approaches and its impact on electricity market scheduling

The world is facing major challenges related to global warming and emissions of greenhouse gases is a major causing factor. In 2017, energy industries accounted for 46% of all CO2 emissions globally, which shows a large potential for reduction. This paper proposes a novel short-term CO2 emissions forecast to enable intelligent scheduling of flexible electricity consumption to minimize the resulting CO2 emissions. Two proposed time series decomposition methods are developed for short-term forecasting of the CO2 emissions of electricity. These are in turn bench-marked against a set of state-of-the-art models. The result is a new forecasting method with a 48-hour horizon targeted the day-ahead electricity market. Forecasting benchmarks for France show that the new method has a mean absolute percentage error that is 25% lower than the best performing state-of-the-art model. Further, application of the forecast for scheduling flexible electricity consumption is studied for five European countries. Scheduling a flexible block of 4 hours of electricity consumption in a 24 hour interval can on average reduce the resulting CO2 emissions by 25% in France, 17% in Germany, 69% in Norway, 20% in Denmark, and just 3% in Poland when compared to consuming at random intervals during the day.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2019

Determining offshore wind installation times using machine learning and open data

The installation process of offshore wind turbines requires the use of expensive jack-up vessels. These vessels regularly report their position via the Automatic Identification System (AIS). This paper introduces a novel approach of applying machine learning to AIS data from jack-up vessels. We apply the new method to 13 offshore wind farms in Danish, German and British waters. For each of the wind farms we identify individual turbine locations, individual installation times, time in transit and time in harbor for the respective vessel. This is done in an automated way exclusively using AIS data with no prior knowledge of turbine locations, thus enabling a detailed description of the entire installation process.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Real-Time Carbon Accounting Method for the European Electricity Markets

Electricity accounts for 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing emissions related to electricity consumption requires accurate measurements readily available to consumers, regulators and investors. In this case study, we propose a new real-time consumption-based accounting approach based on flow tracing. This method traces power flows from producer to consumer thereby representing the underlying physics of the electricity system, in contrast to the traditional input-output models of carbon accounting. With this method we explore the hourly structure of electricity trade across Europe in 2017, and find substantial differences between production and consumption intensities. This emphasizes the importance of considering cross-border flows for increased transparency regarding carbon emission accounting of electricity.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Flow-based analysis of storage usage in a low-carbon European electricity scenario

The application of the flow tracing method to power flows in and out of storage units allows to analyse the usage of this technology option in large-scale interconnected electricity systems. We apply this method to a data-driven model of the European electricity network, which uses a techno-economic optimisation to determine generation and storage capacities and dispatch, assuming a 95% reduction of CO2 emission compared to 1990 levels. A flow-based analysis of the power inflow into the different storage technologies confirms the intuition that longer-term hydrogen storage is mainly utilised for wind, whereas short-term battery storage mostly receives inflow from solar power generation. The usage of storage technologies in general shows a local-but-global behaviour: Whereas on average the power outflow from these capacities is predominantly consumed locally inside the same node, when exported it is also transmitted over long distances as a global flexibility option for the entire system.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Flow-based nodal cost allocation in a heterogeneous highly renewable European electricity network

For a cost efficient design of a future renewable European electricity system, the placement of renewable generation capacity will seek to exploit locations with good resource quality, that is for instance onshore wind in countries bordering the North Sea and solar PV in South European countries. Regions with less favorable renewable generation conditions benefit from this remote capacity by importing the respective electricity as power flows through the transmission grid. The resulting intricate pattern of imports and exports represents a challenge for the analysis of system costs on the level of individual countries. Using a tracing technique, we introduce flow-based nodal levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) which allow to incorporate capital and operational costs associated with the usage of generation capacity located outside the respective country under consideration. This concept and a complementary allocation of transmission infrastructure costs is applied to a simplified model of an interconnected highly renewable European electricity system. We observe that cooperation between the European countries in a heterogeneous system layout does not only reduce the system-wide LCOE, but also the flow-based nodal LCOEs for every country individually.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

Optimal heterogeneity in a simplified highly renewable European electricity system

The resource quality and the temporal generation pattern of variable renewable energy sources vary significantly across Europe. In this paper spatial distributions of renewable assets are explored which exploit this heterogeneity to lower the total system costs for a high level of renewable electricity in Europe. Several intuitive heuristic algorithms, optimal portfolio theory and a local search algorithm are used to find optimal distributions of renewable generation capacities that minimise the total costs of backup, transmission and renewable capacity simultaneously. Using current cost projections, an optimal heterogeneous distribution favours onshore wind, particularly in countries bordering the North Sea, which results in average electricity costs that are up to 11% lower than for a homogeneous reference distribution of renewables proportional to each country's mean load. The reduction becomes even larger, namely 18%, once the transmission capacities are put to zero in the homogeneous reference distribution. Heuristic algorithms to distribute renewable capacity based on each country's wind and solar capacity factors are shown to provide a satisfactory approximation to fully optimised renewable distributions, while maintaining the benefits of transparency and comprehensibility. The sensitivities of the results to changing costs of solar generation and gas supply as well as to the possible cross-sectoral usage of unavoidable curtailment energy are also examined.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

Power flow tracing in a simplified highly renewable European electricity network

The increasing transmission capacity needs in a future energy system raise the question how associated costs should be allocated to the users of a strengthened power grid. In contrast to straightforward oversimplified methods, a flow tracing based approach provides a fair and consistent nodal usage and thus cost assignment of transmission investments. This technique follows the power flow through the network and assigns the link capacity usage to the respective sources or sinks using a diffusion-like process, thus taking into account the underlying network structure and injection pattern. As a showcase, we apply power flow tracing to a simplified model of the European electricity grid with a high share of renewable wind and solar power generation, based on long-term weather and load data with an hourly temporal resolution.

physics.soc-ph↗