Swissmod - A Model of the Swiss Electricity Market

Abstract

We present a bottom-up electricity market model for Switzerland called Swissmod. It includes a detailed electricity network and hydropower representation. Swissmod captures the features and restrictions of run-of-river, yearly storage and pumped-storage power plants and combines this with a network model of the river and water stream system to take the interdependence of hydraulically coupled hydropower plants into account. In addition, the Swiss electricity network is represented using the DC load flow approach, allowing for spatial market evaluations. The model is developed as a deterministic optimization problem in GAMS. It provides an hourly resolution over a one-year horizon with an approximated representation of the surrounding European electricity markets. The aim of this paper is to outline the model and calibrate it to 2012 data.

Linking Europe: The Role of the Swiss Electricity Transmission Grid until 2050

“…The simulation is carried out with Swissmod, a numerical representation of the Swiss electricity wholesale market (Schlecht and Weigt, 2014) following standard electricity market dispatch and network models. Swissmod is designed as a linear programming problem minimizing total generation cost under given demand conditions, although, as described below, we switch to elastic demand and welfare maximization and thus to a quadratic program for this scenario analysis.…”

“…A detailed model description can be found in Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, 2015, Vol. 151 (2) Schlecht and Weigt (2014). For the analysis at hand we adjust the basic model setup by including an elastic linear demand function and consequently switch to welfare maximization instead of cost minimization (see Appendix II).…”

“…We rely on the 2012 calibration of Swissmod as a starting point (Schlecht and Weigt, 2014). The basic representation of the Swiss transmission grid is taken from Swissgrid (2012) and adjusted using locational information from the collaborative mapping project OpenStreetMap.…”

“…We aggregate individual power plants of the neighboring countries to one single representative power plant per modeled neighboring country sub-region for each technology as in (Schlecht and Weigt, 2014). However, to account for the differences in efficiency within each aggregated power plant we calibrate a linear efficiency curve within each technology ranging within two standard deviations of the average efficiency.…”

“…We modify the original Swissmod model (Schlecht and Weigt, 2014) by assuming a linear elastic demand function rather than a fixed constant load in order to maximize welfare instead of minimizing cost.…”