A predictive pan-European economic and production dispatch model for the energy transition in the electricity sector

The energy transition is well underway in most European countries. It has a growing impact on electric power systems as it dramatically modifies the way electricity is produced. To ensure a safe and smooth transition towards a pan-European electricity production dominated by renewable sources, it is of paramount importance to anticipate how production dispatches will evolve, to understand how increased fluctuations in power generations can be absorbed at the pan-European level and to evaluate where the resulting changes in power flows will require significant grid upgrades. To address these issues, we construct an aggregated model of the pan-European transmission network which we couple to an optimized, few-parameter dispatch algorithm to obtain time- and geographically-resolved production profiles. We demonstrate the validity of our dispatch algorithm by reproducing historical production time series for all power productions in fifteen different European countries. Having calibrated our model in this way, we investigate future production profiles at later stages of the energy transition - determined by planned future production capacities - and the resulting interregional power flows. We find that large power fluctuations from increasing penetrations of renewable sources can be absorbed at the pan-European level via significantly increased electricity exchanges between different countries. We identify where these increased exchanges will require additional power transfer capacities. We finally introduce a physically-based economic indicator which allows to predict future financial conditions in the electricity market. We anticipate new economic opportunities for dam hydroelectricity and pumped-storage plants.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

Ground State Properties of Many-Body Systems in the Two-Body Random Ensemble and Random Matrix Theory

We explore generic ground-state and low-energy statistical properties of many-body bosonic and fermionic one- and two-body random ensembles (TBRE) in the dense limit, and contrast them with Random Matrix Theory (RMT). Weak differences in distribution tails can be attributed to the regularity or chaoticity of the corresponding Hamiltonians rather than the particle statistics. We finally show the universality of the distribution of the angular momentum gap between the lowest energy levels in consecutive J-sectors for the four models considered.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Global Robustness vs. Local Vulnerabilities in Complex Synchronous Networks

In complex network-coupled dynamical systems, two questions of central importance are how to identify the most vulnerable components and how to devise a network making the overall system more robust to external perturbations. To address these two questions, we investigate the response of complex networks of coupled oscillators to local perturbations. We quantify the magnitude of the resulting excursion away from the unperturbed synchronous state through quadratic performance measures in the angle or frequency deviations. We find that the most fragile oscillators in a given network are identified by centralities constructed from network resistance distances. Further defining the global robustness of the system from the average response over ensembles of homogeneously distributed perturbations, we find that it is given by a family of topological indices known as generalized Kirchhoff indices. Both resistance centralities and Kirchhoff indices are obtained from a spectral decomposition of the stability matrix of the unperturbed dynamics and can be expressed in terms of resistance distances. We investigate the properties of these topological indices in small-world and regular networks. In the case of oscillators with homogeneous inertia and damping coefficients, we find that inertia only has small effects on robustness of coupled oscillators. Numerical results illustrate the validity of the theory.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Multistability of Phase-Locking and Topological Winding Numbers in Locally Coupled Kuramoto Models on Single-Loop Networks

Determining the number of stable phase-locked solutions for locally coupled Kuramoto models is a long-standing mathematical problem with important implications in biology, condensed matter physics and electrical engineering among others. We investigate Kuramoto models on networks with various topologies and show that different phase-locked solutions are related to one another by loop currents. The latter take only discrete values, as they are characterized by topological winding numbers. This result is generically valid for any network, and also applies beyond the Kuramoto model, as long as the coupling between oscillators is antisymmetric in the oscillators' coordinates. Motivated by these results we further investigate loop currents in Kuramoto-like models. We consider loop currents in nonoriented $n$-node cycle networks with nearest-neighbor coupling. Amplifying on earlier works, we give an algebraic upper bound $\mathcal{N} \le 2 \, {\rm Int}[n/4]+1$ for the number $\cal N$ of different, linearly stable phase-locked solutions. We show that the number of different stable solutions monotonically decreases as the coupling strength is decreased. Furthermore stable solutions with a single angle difference exceeding $\pi/2$ emerge as the coupling constant $K$ is reduced, as smooth continuations of solutions with all angle differences smaller than $\pi/2$ at higher $K$. In a cycle network with nearest-neighbor coupling we further show that phase-locked solutions with two or more angle differences larger than $\pi/2$ are all linearly unstable. We point out similarities between loop currents and vortices in superfluids and superconductors as well as persistent currents in superconducting rings and two-dimensional Josephson junction arrays.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure