A hydropower perspective on flexibility demand and grid frequency control

Sammanfattning: The production and consumption of electricity on the power grid has to balance at all times. Slow balancing, over days and weeks, is governed by the electricity market and carried out through production planning.  Fast balancing, within the operational hour, is carried out by hydropower plants operating in frequency control mode. The need of balancing power is expected to increase as more varying renewable energy production is connected to the grid, and the deregulated electricity market presents a challenge to the frequency control of the grid.The first part of this thesis suggests a method to quantify the need for balancing or energy storage induced by varying renewable energy sources. It is found that for high shares of wind and solar power in the system, the energy storage need over a two-week horizon is almost 20% of the production.The second and third part of the thesis focus on frequency control. In the second part, measurements from three Swedish hydropower plants are compared with the behaviour expected from commonly used power system analysis hydropower models. It is found that backlash in the guide vane and runner regulating mechanisms has a large impact on the frequency control performance of the plants.In the third part of the thesis, the parameters of the primary frequency control in the Nordic grid are optimised with respect to performance, robustness and actuator work. It is found that retuning of the controller parameters can improve the performance and robustness, with a reasonable increase of the actuator work. A floating deadband in the controller is also discussed as a means to improve performance without increasing the actuator work.