Day-Ahead Market Modelling of Large-Scale Highly-Renewable Multi-Energy Systems: Analysis of the North Sea Region towards 2050

This paper proposes a mathematical model in order to simulate Day-ahead markets of large-scale multi-energy systems with a high share of renewable energy. Furthermore, it analyses the importance of including unit commitment when performing such analysis. The results of the case study, which is performed for the North Sea region, show the influence of massive renewable penetration in the energy sector and increasing electrification of the district heating sector towards 2050, and how this impacts the role of other energy sources, such as thermal and hydro. The penetration of wind and solar is likely to challenge the need for balancing in the system as well as the profitability of thermal units. The degree of influence of the unit commitment approach is found to be dependent on the configuration of the energy system. Overall, including unit commitment constraints with integer variables leads to more realistic behaviour of the units, at the cost of considerably increasing the computational time. Relaxing integer variables significantly reduces the computational time, without highly compromising the accuracy of the results. The proposed model, together with the insights from the study case, can be especially useful for system operators for optimal operational planning.