IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2021 - 61

Minimum Production Product
in Winter 2019-2020
Following the plan for phasing out nuclear power in Switzerland, the Mühleberg nuclear power plant was decommissioned in November 2019. The decommissioning coincided
with limited controllability and capacity limitations for the
Bassecourt transformer and delays in the commissioning
of a new transformer in Mühleberg. As a consequence, and
assuming that the missing power was to be compensated by
additional import from the north, i.e., by increasing the net
transfer capacity to Austria, Germany, and France, some network elements in Western Switzerland (especially the transformer in Bassecourt) were expected to be overloaded during
the low consumption period between Christmas 2019 and
New Year 2020.
To guarantee grid security in the region between Bassecourt, Mühleberg, and Chamoson, Swissgrid agreed upon
a minimum level of production with selected power plants
in Western Switzerland from 20 December 2019 to 6 January 2020. Specifically, the selected power plants agreed
to cumulatively produce a minimum of 200 MW at offpeak times and 400 MW at peak times. This longer-term
preventive measure was shown to be preferable and more

economical to alternative measures, such as reducing the
net transfer capacity to Austria, Germany, and France (i.e.,
to incentivize Swiss power plants to increase production) or
resorting to many shorter-term national and/or international
redispatch calls closer to real-time operation.
This is a relevant example of real-world situations where
new measures against grid insecurity must be devised by
system operators in a short amount of time. Despite the
measure's success, this event demonstrated the value of an
integrated approach for outage planning and the selection
of remedial actions, which can include the design of new or
customized products such as longer-term minimum power
production products. TSOs would benefit from a new operational paradigm, including such an integrated planning and
operation approach.

COVID-19 Lockdown in March-April 2020
As a measure against the spread of COVID-19, the Swiss
Federal Council ordered the closing of stores and public venues starting 16 March 2020. Neighboring European countries took similar measures around the same point in time.
As a consequence, the domestic energy consumption during weekdays and the energy flows in and across the Swiss

any

Lines
Substations

St. Gallen

1
France

Zürich

Bern

France
Genève

Austria

Chur

Lugano
Italy
Italy

Italy

France

figure 2. The measures applied to relieve the stressed grid situation in winter 2015-2016. Location 1: a temporary connection of the transformer in Laufenburg to allow for transformation between the 380- and 220-kV networks. Location
2: the topological measures to increase the import on the 220-kV level from Austria via the Rhine Valley. Location 3: the
commissioning of a reserve transformer in Tierfehd.
march/april 2021

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