Optimally allocating renewable generation in Ireland: a long-term outlook until 2050. ESRI Research Bulletin, 2018/03

The Irish energy white paper released in December 2015 states the objective of diversifying electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES-E). While onshore wind is planned to continue to make a significant contribution, the question arises which roles other RES-E technologies, such as solar PV, wind offshore or bioenergy, will play in the future. Moreover, the Irish 2030 target for RES-E is about to be set. Since the electricity demand growth in future is uncertain and the national target is yet unknown, this creates a high uncertainty around the overall amount of RES-E required. In this uncertain context, this research seeks to provide support for 1. achieving the national RES-E target determined as percentage share of energy demand in a cost minimal way under consideration of different diversification approaches, and 2. long-term planning of the electricity system by providing insight into the future regional distribution of generation and demand under different scenarios

A Framework for Electric Mobility Services for a Car Park

Electric vehicles (EV) are seen as one promising technology which can provide flexibility to the demand side in the electricity market. One promising application might be a car park where an operator schedules the charging processes of EV. This paper outlines a conceptual framework to enhance this demand side flexibility of EV customers with incentives through diverse service designs. Thereby, the development of a business model takes both sides into account: the offset between cost and benefits for the operator as well as tariffs with attractive incentives for customers. We focus in the following on a car park and give a comprehensive outline on the design of services for different groups of EV customers

On the role of electricity storage in capacity remuneration mechanisms

In electricity markets around the world, the substantial increase of intermittent renewable electricity generation has intensified concerns about generation adequacy, ultimately driving the implementation of capacity remuneration mechanisms. Although formally technology-neutral, substantial barriers often exist in these mechanisms for non-conventional capacity such as electricity storage. In this article, we provide a rigorous theoretical discussion on design parameters and show that the concrete design of a capacity remuneration mechanism always creates a bias towards one technology or the other. In particular, we can identify the bundling of capacity auctions with call options and the definition of the storage capacity credit as essential drivers affecting the future technology mix as well as generation adequacy. In order to illustrate and confirm our theoretical findings, we apply an agent-based electricity market model and run a number of simulations. Our results show that electricity storage has a capacity value and should therefore be allowed to participate in any capacity remuneration mechanism. Moreover, we find the implementation of a capacity remuneration mechanism with call options and a strike price to increase the competitiveness of storages against conventional power plants. However, determining the amount of firm capacity an electricity storage unit can provide remains a challenging task

Onshore wind energy in Baden-Württemberg: a bottom-up economic assessment of the socio-technical potential

Detailed information about the potentials and costs of renewable energies is an important input factor for energy system models, as well as commercial and political decision-making processes. With its increasing locally installed capacity and hub height, wind energy plays an important role when it comes to meeting climate targets and optimizing electricity networks. Recently however, wind energy has faced more and more social barriers and land use constraints which can negatively impact both political goals and investment decisions. Therefore this work presents a bottom-up methodology based on graph-theoretical considerations to account for social barriers to estimate the socio-technical potential and the associated costs on a wind farm level. Calculations are conducted for the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg as a case study and are based on high resolution land use and wind speed data, using an algorithm to place wind parks by considering further constraints relating to land use planning. The socio-technical potential is found to be less than half that of previous studies that neglect these constraints, i.e. between 11.8 and 29.4 TWh, with costs between 7 and 14 €ct/kWh. A sensitivity analysis reveals a strong dependency of the overall socio-technical potential as well as its distribution across the federal state. In order to test the quality of the algorithm, already existing and planned wind parks were compared to modeled wind park locations and a very good correlation could be observed. The focus in future work should lie on the development of an economic criterion, which unlike the LCOE is able to account for the system costs of a widespread wind energy development, including network expansion, balancing power and reserve energy costs

Demand response through decentralized optimization in residential areas with wind and photovoltaics

A paradigm shift has to be realized in future energy systems with high shares of renewable energy sources. The electrical demand has to react to the fluctuating electricity generation of renewable energy sources. To this end, flexible electrical loads like electric heating devices coupled with thermal storage or electric vehicles are necessary in combination with optimization approaches. In this paper, we develop a novel privacy-preserving approach for decentralized optimization to exploit load flexibility. This approach, which is based on a set of schedules, is referred to as SEPACO-IDA. The results show that our developed algorithm outperforms the other approaches for scheduling based decentralized optimization found in the literature. Furthermore, this paper clearly illustrates the suboptimal results for uncoordinated decentralized optimization and thus the strong need for coordination approaches. Another contribution of this paper is the development and evaluation of two methods for distributing a central wind power profile to the local optimization problem of distributed agents (Equal Distribution and Score-Rank-Proportional Distribution). These wind profile assignment methods are combined with different decentralized optimization approaches. The results reveal the dependency of the best wind profile assignment method on the used decentralized optimization approach

On the Role of Electricity Storage in Capacity Remuneration Mechanisms

In electricity markets around the world, the substantial increase of intermittent renewable electricity generation has intensified concerns about generation adequacy, ultimately driving the implementation of capacity remuneration mechanisms. Although formally technology-neutral, substantial barriers often exist in these mechanisms for non-conventional capacity such as electricity storage. In this article, we provide a rigorous theoretical discussion on design parameters and show that the concrete design of a capacity remuneration mechanism always creates a bias towards one technology or the other. In particular, we can identify the bundling of capacity auctions with call options and the definition of the storage capacity credit as essential drivers affecting the future technology mix as well as generation adequacy. In order to illustrate and confirm our theoretical findings, we apply an agent-based electricity market model and run a number of simulations. Our results show that electricity storage has a capacity value and should therefore be allowed to participate in any capacity remuneration mechanism. Moreover, we find the implementation of a capacity remuneration mechanism with call options and a strike price to increase the competitiveness of storages against conventional power plants. However, determining the amount of firm capacity an electricity storage unit can provide remains a challenging task