Estimation of the Spanish secondary reserves requirements

The increasing penetration of Intermittent Generation (IG) is being accompanied by the revision of the needs of traditional regulation reserves, as well as the discussion of new flexibility products for system balancing. In the context of electricity generation models, it is of high relevance to adequately represent, not only the energy, but also the reserve dispatch constraints, by providing the models with the expected secondary reserve requirements (SRR), so as to output more realistic energy and reserve schedules and prices. This paper analyses the SRR published by the Spanish System Operator and uses several forecasting tools for determining its main explanatory variables. Results confirm that the SRR have remained almost constant during the years of significant IG growth (and even slightly decreasing in the most recent years), and that the best SRR estimation models found use the demand and its inter-hour variations as the main explanatory variables, but not wind productions as could be expected.