Analysing long-term interactions between demand response and different electricity markets using a stochastic market equilibrium model. ESRI WP585, February 2018

Power systems based on renewable energy sources (RES) are characterised by increasingly distributed, volatile and uncertain supply leading to growing requirements for flexibility. In this paper, we explore the role of demand response (DR) as a source of flexibility that is considered to become increasingly important in future. The majority of research in this context has focussed on the operation of power systems in energy only markets, mostly using deterministic optimisation models. In contrast, we explore the impact of DR on generator investments and profits from different markets, on costs for different consumers from different markets, and on CO2 emissions under consideration of the uncertainties associated with the RES generation. We also analyse the effect of the presence of a feed-in premium (FIP) for RES generation on these impacts. We therefore develop a novel stochastic mixed complementarity model in this paper that considers both operational and investment decisions, that considers interactions between an energy market, a capacity market and a feed-in premium and that takes into account the stochasticity of electricity generation by RES. We use a Benders decomposition algorithm to reduce the computational expenses of the model and apply the model to a case study based on the future Irish power system. We find that DR particularly increases renewable generator profits. While DR may reduce consumer costs from the energy market, these savings may be (over)compensated by increasing costs from the capacity market and the feed-in premium. This result highlights the importance of considering such interactions between different markets

The Role of Hydrological Modelling Uncertainties in Climate Change Impact Assessments of Irish River Catchments

Conceptual Rainfall Runoff (CRR) models forced with regional climate change scenarios downscaled from Global Climate Models (GCMs) are widely employed to assess the impacts of climate change at the catchment scale. This approach is subject to a range of uncertainties associated with future emissions of greenhouse gases, the response of the climate system to these changes at global and local scales, and uncertainties associated with the impact models. These uncertainties then cascade through the climate change impact assessment methodology with potentially large uncertainties associated with critical future impacts at the local scale where key decisions are required in order to increase the resilience of water supply management and infrastructure to future changes. Given that uncertainty in modelling will not be significantly reduced in the short or medium term future, ensuring that potentially expensive and irreversible adaptation decisions made now are robust to the uncertainty in future climate change impacts means that considerable effort is required in investigating and quantifying sources of uncertainty

The Isle of Man Climate Change Scoping Study: Future climate change scenarios

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Climate Change and Soil Hydrology: European Perspectives.

The climate of Europe has been changing along similar lines to that of the globe as a whole, with warming of 0.9 °C being experienced over the period 1901–2005 (Alcamo et al., 2007). Though future changes in rainfall to be expected as a result of continued warming are subject to large uncertainties, mean rainfall intensity is expected to increase significantly across the continent, irrespective of local changes in annual or seasonal receipt (Giorgi et al., 2004). Of more significance for soil processes and soil hydrology is the substantially increased likelihood of extreme precipitation events

Catering for Uncertainty in a Conceptual Rainfall Runoff Model: Model Preparation for Climate Change Impact Assessment and the Application of GLUE using Latin Hypercube Sampling

Changes in Irish climate may pose a number of obstacles for water resource management. There is a need to approach this problem using the catchment as the basic unit of analysis. The application of a lumped conceptual rainfall-runoff model for simulating beyond a baseline calibration set is a major challenge for climate change impact assessment. This is due in no small part to the limitations associated with the use of these models, with uncertainty in model output being associated with model structure and the non-uniqueness of optimised parameter sets. In this paper, HYSIM, an “off-the-shelf” conceptual rainfall runoff model using data on a daily time-step is applied to a suite of catchments throughout Ireland in preparation for use with downscaled climate data. Uncertainties relating to process parameter calibration due to parameter interaction and equifinality are highlighted. In an attempt to improve the reliability of model output the generalised likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) framework is adopted to analyse the uncertainty in model output derived from parametric sources. Traditionally this approach has been applied using Monte Carlo random sampling (MCRS). However, when using an “off-the-shelf” type model, source code may not be available and it may not be feasible to run the model for large MCRS samples without user intervention. In order to make the propagation of uncertainty through the model more efficient, input parameter sets are generated using Latin Hypercube sampling (LHS). A number of acceptable parameter sets are generated and uncertainty bounds are constructed for each time step using the 5th and 95th percentile at each temporal interval. These uncertainty bounds will be used to quantify the uncertainty in simulations carried out beyond the baseline calibration period as they include the error derived from data measurement, model structure, and parameterisation

The Isle of Man Climate Change Scoping Study: Climate indicators

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Climate Change Scenarios and Challenges for the Water Environment

The provision of downscaled global circulation output is the first stage in assessing the implications of climate change for the water environment. Using only one global climate model Sweeney and Fealy, 2003 concluded that projected changes in climate will have potentially large effects on the water environment in Ireland, particularly on flood and drought frequencies. Increased winter runoff in western parts as a result of wetter winters and decreased summer runoff, especially in eastern Ireland as a result of substantial reductions in summer rainfall are projected. Considerable uncertainties however exist from such projections since they are based on only one GCM. These uncertainties limit the reliability of such climate scenarios for future water resource management since different GCMs tend to show different results for areas such as Ireland. This arises from inherent weaknesses they possess due to problems of scale and feedback. One way of addressing these uncertainties and providing more reliable inputs to hydrological models is to use multi- model downscaling, and this approach is presented here

Changing Precipitation Scenarios: preliminary implications for groundwater flow systems and planning.

Statistical downscaling of a suite of three global climate models for two emission scenarios are used to produce precipitation scenarios for Ireland to 2090. One of these was used to drive a rainfall-runoff model for the River Boyne. The model was calibrated over the 1961-90 base period, validated using 1991-2000 data and run for three future time periods using downscaled GCM output. Significant changes in monthly flow regimes, soil moisture storage and groundwater storage were noted, with summer flows typically reduced by 20%. Negative changes in soil moisture storage also resulted, with soil moisture deficits increasingly extending into the Autumn as the century proceeds. Such a situation is seen to potentially compromise groundwater recharge in individual years and an increasing lag in groundwater recharge was detected. By the 2080s the groundwater recharge lag has developed to the extent that spring and early summer surface flows appear to be still benefiting from winter groundwater recharge while by late autumn groundwater is seriously depleted due to drier summer conditions. Serious implications for water yield from groundwater-fed sources would thus arise in the event of a dry winter being experienced. Greater conservatism in estimating water yields from groundwater sources would seem appropriate and may require to be formally incorporated into planning procedures

The Isle of Man Climate Change Scoping Study: Climate change and water resources on the Isle of Man

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The Isle of Man Climate Change Scoping Study: Future climate change scenarios

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