The pain and gain of using pumped storage plants for fast grid support

The increasing share of renewable sources in energy systems introduces new challenges in terms of grid support and system operation, especially in regions with island grids or weak connections to a main grid. Major generation or consumer contingency outages, or forecast errors, can lead to rapid changes in frequency, requiring fast grid support and introducing additional loads to pumped-storage plants. Accurate simulation of system operating conditions is fundamental for the implementation or operation of pumped-storage plants in these conditions. The characteristics of grid-connected generation and loads, the behaviour of the pumped-storage plants, and their contribution to optimization of grid operating conditions must be modelled and investigated thoroughly. Computational simulations are a cost-effective and accurate tool to tackle this issue. This paper presents two cases of simulating the operation of pumped-storage plants.