Surrogate modeling of interconnector flows: A machine learning alternative to full-scale power system simulations with application to cross-border electricity exchange

R. Gaugl, E. Insunza Díaz, J. Portela, S. Wogrin

Applied Energy Vol. 427, nº. Part C, pp. 128946

Resumen:

Cross-border electricity exchanges are crucial for operating and planning highly renewable power systems. Many studies reduce spatial granularity to keep models tractable and prescribe cross-border exchanges exogenously, often by reusing historical import/export time series. Such assumptions become inconsistent as renewable penetration changes the magnitude and timing of flows. The core contribution of this work is a machine-learning (ML) surrogate framework that maps nodal time-series data (e.g., hourly demand and renewable generation) to synthetic interconnector-level flow time series. The resulting flows serve as fixed boundary conditions in reduced power system optimization models (PSOMs). This addresses studies focused on a subset of an interconnected system, for which repeatedly solving the full model across multiple climate years or scenarios is computationally expensive. We demonstrate the framework on a pan-European single-node-per-country DC optimal power flow model. We benchmark k-nearest neighbors (KNN), ridge regression, random forests, Extra Trees, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and feedforward neural-network (SQU) surrogates. As an additional contribution, we introduce a novel custom neural-network loss that softly penalizes physically implausible flow patterns. This soft penalty is not a guarantee of full power-flow feasibility. Across benchmarks, the SQU variants provide the most consistent out-of-sample and downstream optimization performance while substantially outperforming scaled historical profiles. The ML-generated flows closely reproduce country-level results of the full European model while greatly reducing computation time (up to ∼500×). The proposed framework enables scenario-consistent reduced PSOM studies across climate years after a single full-model run, eliminating repeated pan-European simulations and supporting more robust climate-year analyses under fixed system assumptions.

Resumen divulgativo:

Usamos machine learning para predecir los intercambios de electricidad entre países. Esto permite estudiar sistemas eléctricos nacionales con resultados próximos a los del modelo europeo completo, reduciendo el tiempo de cálculo hasta 500 veces.

Palabras Clave: Surrogate modeling; Machine learning; Power system optimization; DC optimal power flow; Renewable integration; Energy system modeling

Índice de impacto JCR-JIF y cuartil WoS: 12,200 - Q1 (2025)

Referencia DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2026.128946

Publicado en papel: Enero 2027.

Publicado on-line: Septiembre 2026.

Cita:
R. Gaugl, E. Insunza Díaz, J. Portela, S. Wogrin, "Surrogate modeling of interconnector flows: A machine learning alternative to full-scale power system simulations with application to cross-border electricity exchange", Applied Energy, Vol. 427, nº. Part C, pp. 128946, Enero 2027. [Online: Septiembre 2026] doi: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2026.128946