Assessing the economic impacts for outages of HVDC-cables connecting the Nordic area and continental Europe

The Nordic and especially the Norwegian hydro-based power production is in a favourable position to provide parts of required generation back-up capacity for RES in continental Europe. In order to provide this capacity, sufficient transfer capacity needs to be available. For such HVDC-cables, it is observed that outages do occur occasionally and can remain for long periods. During these events, back-up capacity could not be provided. The aim of the analysis presented in this paper is to assess the impact of HVDC-cable outages on the value of providing back-up generation capacity to continental Europe. In addition, the effects of transmission outages are compared to outages of thermal generation capacity.