The comparison of the tool Parsifal with two mid-term planning tools for the electric production of isolated systems

Abstract: The tool Parsifal is a middle-term planning tool developed by the R&D department and the Operation Center. It is used operationally by various isolated systems at EDF, in particular EDF Land. It meets a need for optimization of the electrical power (thermal, hydraulic, markets) over a period of one year or two. Parsifal allows a precise modeling of the hydraulic system, taking into account the hydrological coupling between units lying in the same valley. The algorithm of stochastic dynamic programming of Parsifal handles uncertainty on the availability of the units, on the demand and on the hydrological inflows. However, this powerful – but old – tool is being challenged by new tools which are under study in this project. The aim of this work is to analyze the features of such tools for a potential replacement of Parsifal, that is considered as the reference tool since it has been used operationally for a couple of decades. The comparison has to be done based on the simulation results and on the user interface of the tools that are considered. The goal is to determine if the tool under study is able to provide results consistent with Parsifal and operationally usable by EDF in its production context. The production context that lies within the scope of this project is limited to isolated systems. This work should help OSIRIS to make its mind about the replacement of Parsifal by Tick-Tack, a middle-term optimization tool developed internally by EDF, or by SDDP, a Brazilian tool developed by the company PSR. According to the results of this study both tools get an operation policy that turns more expensive than Parsifal. This cost difference is due to the water management of the hydro resource that is less optimal in the tools compared with Parsifal. In Tick-Tack as in SDDP, the main reason for this difference is the handling of spillage in the case of wet inflow scenarios. However, both Tick-Tack and SDDP benefit from a user-friendly interface and a smaller calculation time than Parsifal. As a general result of this project, the tool Parsifal cannot be operationally replaced either by Tick-Tack or by SDDP. Indeed, although Tick-Tack and SDDP offer interesting features in terms of calculation time and graphical interface, they have not been designed in order to meet the specific needs of the operational production of isolated systems like Parsifal has. Consequently, Parsifal will remain the tool that is used for the electrical production middle-term planning of isolated systems in France. However, this study will be used as a basis for future studies that will go into deeper details. These studies may consider several unavailability scenarios instead of only one and add a spillage penalty that prevents the tools from unnecessary spillage.