FARAO

CASTOR has joined the parallel run for the capacity calculation of the CORE region

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

CASTOR is officially live on CORE regional capacity calculation external parallel run!

CASTOR is a remedial action optimiser developed by RTE, open source and a key tool for the ecological transition by maximizing the cross border exchanges over Europe through the optimisation of non-costly and not polluting remedial actions.

Because we are convinced that sharing our expertise and knowledge is the most efficient way for a successful energy transition and creation of a common European market. All can benefit from this collaborative project amongst different national expertise on system operation, without neglecting national specificities due to structural differences in network development between countries.

It is part of the open source project dedicated to remedial action optimisation, so called FARAO. It is based on Java library Powsybl and includes the open source loadflow module “Open Loadflow”. Thanks to its scalability, CASTOR can either be used by Regional Coordination Center for capacity calculation/security analysis and by TSOs for their compliancy with the European clean energy package (i.e. validation of 70% minimum remaining available margin).

Since July 2021, CASTOR is already performing the daily optimisation of topological remedial actions on the French electricity network in the process of local validation on Italy North Capacity Calculations. By maximizing the use of efficient remedial actions as preventive & curative topological actions, TSOs can limit the activation of costly and often polluting solutions as redispatching or countertrading.

Thanks to the team of RTE, RTE international & CORESO for reaching successfully this first milestone.

CASTOR optimises the remedial actions for the capacity calculation of the CORE region

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

FARAO v2.1.1 has been recently released. FARAO v2.1.1 notably includes all the features which were planned in July’s milestone of our CASTOR’s roadmap , that is to say:

Optimisation of preventive PST and topological remedial actions
Two possible objective functions : min. margin positive or min. margin maximized
Branch monitored in one or both directions, with thresholds defined in MW, A or %Imax
Branch monitored in N and N-1 states
AC and DC computations (for load flow and sensitivity analyses)
Limitation of loop-flows in the RAO

With in addition another key feature: the consideration of MNEC (Monitored Network Element) in the optimisation. The CRAC importers have also been improved, with some new development enabling to efficiently read real data in the standard file formats used for the capacity calculation of CORE, with hundreds of contingencies and thousands of Cnec.

Moreover, before its release, the RAO has been tested on several timestamps of the CORE capacity calculation process. The results of the first remedial action optimisations are very satisfying, and allow to increase the room for power exchanges between CORE countries, while making sure that the loop-flows do not exceed a given threshold, and that the MNECs keep a positive margin.

Our efforts in designing and developing FARAO are still ongoing, and new features are yet to come in your favorite remedial action optimiser!

More information about FARAO v2.1.1 can be found in the release note

For any question, don’t hesitate to contact us using the FARAO Spectrum community.

FARAO v2.0.0 has been released

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

FARAO team is pleased to inform that the latest version of FARAO has been released. It is the first step in the development of our open source search-tree RAO tool. For more details about the new features, please refer to the release note.

Good things come in pairs, the website has been updated:

the new roadmap is available,
the documentation is enriched, especially for the new features on Search Tree RAO.

For any question, don’t hesitate to contact us using the FARAO Spectrum community.

See you soon!

FARAO team

Test data for FARAO has been open-sourced

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

FARAO team is glad to announce that test data sets have been released for FARAO core engine and FARAO GSE.

These files are designed as an example of what is possible in the framework, and will be updated all along the life of the project to include illustrations of each feature.

For more information on what is currently available, please refer to the farao-test-data repository and especially the README.md file that lists and describes currently available data.

For any question on this data set, do not hesitate to use GitHub issues of farao-test-data repository, or contact us using the newly created FARAO Spectrum community. More information about the Spectrum community of FARAO will be shared soon, so do not hesitate to join the community by becoming a FARAO community member on Spectrum!

See you soon!

FARAO team

FARAO code base is open-source

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are, FARAO code base has been open-sourced on GitHub this day. It’s been a long journey, but it is only the first step of a more exciting year to come…

Current FARAO code is just the base on which our future tools will be built. We want FARAO community to be part of these tools design and/or improvements. That is main reason why we decided to publish FARAO on an open platform such as GitHub.

Current code base is divided into two repositories:

farao-core which contains the core features of FARAO: CRAC model and import functions, remedial actions optimisation interface and prototype, …
farao-gse which contains the demonstration interface for FARAO features. It will be the base for future results demonstration.

FARAO community website has also been enriched with a documentation space , which is a good source of information about FARAO project. A high level roadmap has also been added.

If you have any question, do not hesitate to contact via GitHub issues.

See you soon on GitHub !

FARAO team

A step towards FARAO open-sourcing

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

FARAO toolbox goes a step towards open-source distribution…

FARAO community space on GitHub has been created, and the team is currently working at the code base migration. The first release is coming soon.

Checking that no private information is left in the code, that there is no license incompatibility in the code base, that the code is understandable and documented enough… That is an important work, that gives us the opportunity to look back on those few months of development and make sure the team provides high quality inputs to the community!

We are really looking forward to share the results of this work with the community - at least the part that has not yet been shared via our participation in powsybl framework!

Just a few weeks left !

Welcome in FARAO community

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

What is FARAO? FARAO is a Powsybl based toolbox that aims at providing open-source, fully transparent software solutions for coordinated processes in power sytems operations and planning.

FARAO context

FARAO project is born in a particular context for European electricity system. The publication of CACM regulation¹ followed by the successive launch of all the capacity calculation projects in the multiple capacity calculation regions in Europe created a high demand on IT platforms and computation tools for dealing with new services to be provided by RSCs (Regional Security Coordinators).

TSOs (Transport System Operators) and RSCs are facing high implementation challenges. Exchange standards implementation and efficient computation modules for coordination processes are key elements in the electricity system mutation.

We strongly believe that the only way to face these challenges is to build a large community around open-source tools. That is the reason why FARAO project was created.

Ambition and planning

In FARAO team, we have one ambition: create an open, transparent and modular toolbox for supporting coordination processes experiments and industrialisation. That is the main reason why we decided to base our developments on Powsybl framework, a project supported by the Linux Foundation through the LF Energy project.

We want these tools to be shared, developed and improved with the community, including:

CGMES integration and associated files (GLSK, CRAC, CNE)
Flowbased computation module
Remedial actions optimisation module

The first complete release of FARAO is expected on June 2019, but modules will be released regularly as they are ready.

Capacity Allocation & Congestion Management, published on 07/24/2015. The text can be found on ENTSO-E network code page. ↩