How fast can one overcome the paradox of the energy transition? A physico-economic model for the European power grid

The paradox of the energy transition is that the low marginal costs of new renewable energy sources (RES) drag electricity prices down and discourage investments in flexible productions that are needed to compensate for the lack of dispatchability of the new RES. The energy transition thus discourages the investments that are required for its own harmonious expansion. To investigate how this paradox can be overcome, we argue that, under certain assumptions, future electricity prices are rather accurately modeled from the residual load obtained by subtracting non-flexible productions from the load. Armed with the resulting economic indicator, we investigate future revenues for European power plants with various degree of flexibility. We find that, if neither carbon taxes nor fuel prices change, flexible productions would be financially rewarded better and sooner if the energy transition proceeds faster but at more or less constant total production, i.e. by reducing the production of thermal power plants at the same rate as the RES production increases. Less flexible productions, on the other hand, would see their revenue grow more moderately. Our results indicate that a faster energy transition with a quicker withdrawal of thermal power plants would reward flexible productions faster.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures and 2 table

Ground State Properties of Many-Body Systems in the Two-Body Random Ensemble and Random Matrix Theory

We explore generic ground-state and low-energy statistical properties of many-body bosonic and fermionic one- and two-body random ensembles (TBRE) in the dense limit, and contrast them with Random Matrix Theory (RMT). Weak differences in distribution tails can be attributed to the regularity or chaoticity of the corresponding Hamiltonians rather than the particle statistics. We finally show the universality of the distribution of the angular momentum gap between the lowest energy levels in consecutive J-sectors for the four models considered.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

A predictive pan-European economic and production dispatch model for the energy transition in the electricity sector

The energy transition is well underway in most European countries. It has a growing impact on electric power systems as it dramatically modifies the way electricity is produced. To ensure a safe and smooth transition towards a pan-European electricity production dominated by renewable sources, it is of paramount importance to anticipate how production dispatches will evolve, to understand how increased fluctuations in power generations can be absorbed at the pan-European level and to evaluate where the resulting changes in power flows will require significant grid upgrades. To address these issues, we construct an aggregated model of the pan-European transmission network which we couple to an optimized, few-parameter dispatch algorithm to obtain time- and geographically-resolved production profiles. We demonstrate the validity of our dispatch algorithm by reproducing historical production time series for all power productions in fifteen different European countries. Having calibrated our model in this way, we investigate future production profiles at later stages of the energy transition - determined by planned future production capacities - and the resulting interregional power flows. We find that large power fluctuations from increasing penetrations of renewable sources can be absorbed at the pan-European level via significantly increased electricity exchanges between different countries. We identify where these increased exchanges will require additional power transfer capacities. We finally introduce a physically-based economic indicator which allows to predict future financial conditions in the electricity market. We anticipate new economic opportunities for dam hydroelectricity and pumped-storage plants.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure