PhD Thesis - Abhijith Prakash

This repository contains my PhD thesis.

Balance of Power: Designing operational practices for balancing electricity markets with growing penetrations of renewable energy

The thesis is available via UNSWorks (open-access).

Summary

Massive deployments of solar and wind generation mean that power systems worldwide are beginning to experience high penetrations of variable renewable energy. Given the challenges and opportunities posed by these resources to the effective and efficient balancing of supply and demand in power systems, policy-makers are revisiting the design of power system operational practices such as grid codes, system operator processes and, in jurisdictions with wholesale competition, electricity markets.

In this thesis, I explore how policy-makers should approach designing operational practices for balancing electricity markets. Because the design process is complex, contested and contextual, I employ an empirical approach that leverages experience from the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM).

Frequency control services are critical to ensuring that imbalances are quickly addressed. In this thesis, I first explore the features needed in arrangements for procuring frequency control services during energy transition. Through a comprehensive international review and an assessment of the NEM, I offer four insights on designing frequency control arrangements as power systems transition.

Increased balancing flexibility will be required during energy transition. Market arrangements should be assessed to determine whether they can deliver sufficient flexibility. As a contribution to this assessment, I investigate how balancing flexibility capabilities in scheduling timeframes are changing during energy transition using historical and projected resource mixes for two regions of the NEM. Based on the findings, I recommend that policy-makers examine how existing arrangements can be augmented to elicit upwards flexibility provision, and that duration specifications and sustained footroom procurement be considered for reserve products.

Market participants must be willing and able to offer balancing flexibility into wholesale spot markets. As such, I explore how market knowledge processes and participation rules can be configured to maximise balancing flexibility provision. From an analysis of centralised price forecasts from the NEM, I find that errors in these forecasts are increasing in frequency and severity and, as such, arbitrage revenues can be reduced by 15-60+% should these forecasts be used to guide battery energy storage scheduling. I recommend that policy-makers increase the frequency at which forecasts are published and consider market participation restrictions.

How to compile the thesis from source

This uses the following template, with contributions from myself:

Tom Pollard et al. (2016). Template for writing a PhD thesis in Markdown. Zenodo. http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.58490

How it works

1. Markdown (.md) source files are located in source. These should be numbered using at least two characters (i.e. 0x for 0 <= x < 10) in an order that you want the document to be compiled in. Read the pandoc User Guide for information on syntax for figures, tables, etc. Referencing (citations/figures/tables) is handled using pandoc-crossref, which you will need to install.
2. pandoc can then be called to compile the Markdown source files to docx, .tex, .pdf and .html outputs. The following configure how pandoc compiles these outputs:

   • source/metadata.yml provides metadata in YAML format to pandoc for all formats

   • source/references.bib is the bibiliography for all formats

   • style contains:

     • Templates for .tex/.pdf and .html
     • A preamble.tex file, which is used as a header file for the .tex output. You should put LaTeX config inpreamble.tex
     • A CSL (citation style) file. Replace with the CSL you want and change the CSL name in source/metadata.yml

   • filters contains Lua filters that enable short captions in the List of Figures/Tables for .tex/.pdf output (in lieu of longer figure/table captions). Click links for figure short captions syntax and table short captions syntax.

3. For .tex/.pdf, pandoc can't handle a few things right (wrapping text in multirow/column tables and subfigure short captions). I have hacked around this by using sed to modify the .tex that pandoc generates, before running latexmk to convert .tex to .pdf. If you remove these hacks (remove sed calls in Makefile), you can use pandoc to directly compile to .pdf (i.e. change make pdf to a pandoc call).
4. output contains outputs. If GitHub Pages is enabled for the repo, you can view the HTML output online. I have enabled hypothes.is comments, which allows someone to add comments to the HTML page (these will be retained as the HTML output is updated). The HTML output uses components in output/css and output/source.

How to use

1. Install pandoc 3.0+

2. Install pandoc-crossref. You can build it from source by installing stack (make install_stack) and then by running make install_pandoc_filters

3. The Makefile contains commands to build outputs.

   • Ensure GNU Make is installed
   • Rewrite the copy_bib command as need be (based on my file system), or remove altogether
   • Run make pdf, make html, make docx or make tex to generate the appropriate output. Prior to running pandoc, these commands will run copy_bib to ensure the local .bib file is up to date.
   • Alternatively, you can run make all to make all outputs

4. A GitHub action (static.yml) hosts the HTML output (index.html) on the repository page

   • Pages must be enabled for the repository
   • The pandoc HTML template enables a hypothes.is toolbar which can be used for annotations/commenting
   • This URL cannot be made private unless you are a GitHub Enterprise member