Performance of multi-scenario equivalent hydropower models

Simulations and analysis of large hydro-thermal power systems easily become computationally heavy without simplifications of the system at hand. Hydropower, in particular, presents a challenge as complex river systems add a large amount of variables and linked constraints to the analysis. A possible simplification is to use aggregated Equivalent models for different parts of the hydrosystem which give similar results, with respect to e.g. power production, as a more detailed description of the Original system. In this paper, novel linear multi-scenario Equivalent models for hourly simulations of nonlinear hydropower systems are developed and their performance investigated. The new models consider multiple scenarios for inflow, price and start resp. end content in the reservoirs as well as reserves for balancing capacity. The performance analysis is based on case studies over Swedish hydropower systems located in the electricity trading area SE1. The average relative error in power production is 9-15% and the computation time is reduced from 9 hours to between 0.4 and 36 seconds.