The value of electricity and reserve services in low carbon electricity systems
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Published version
Author(s)
Vijay, A
Fouquet, N
Staffell, IL
Hawkes, AD
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Decarbonising electricity systems is essential for mitigating climate change. Future systems will likely incorporate higher penetrations of intermittent renewable and inflexible nuclear power. This will significantly impact on system operations, particularly the requirements for flexibility in terms of reserves and the cost of such services. This paper estimates the interrelated changes in wholesale electricity and reserve prices using two novel methods. Firstly, it simulates the short run marginal cost of generation using a unit commitment model with post-processing to achieve realistic prices. It also introduces a new reserve price model, which mimics actual operation by first calculating the day ahead schedules and then letting deviations from schedule drive reserve prices. The UK is used as a case study to compare these models with traditional methods from the literature. The model gives good agreement with and historic prices in 2015. In a 2035 scenario, increased renewables penetration reduces mean electricity prices, and leads to price spikes due to expensive plants being brought online briefly to cope with net load variations. Contrary to views previously held in literature, a renewable intensive scenario does not lead to a higher reserve price than a fossil fuel intensive scenario. Demand response technology is shown to offer sizeable economic benefits when maintaining system balance. More broadly, this framework can be used to evaluate the economics of providing reserve services by aggregating decentralised energy resources such as heat pumps, micro-CHP and electric vehicles.
Date Issued
2017-05-20
Date Acceptance
2017-05-11
Citation
Applied Energy, 2017, 201, pp.111-123
ISSN
1872-9118
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
111
End Page
123
Journal / Book Title
Applied Energy
Volume
201
Copyright Statement
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Grant Number
150847 - EP/N021479/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Energy & Fuels
Engineering, Chemical
Engineering
Electricity price
Low carbon power systems
Short run marginal cost
Unit commitment
MILP
Optimization
ENERGY-SYSTEM
SPOT MARKET
BRITISH ELECTRICITY
TIME HORIZON
JOINT ENERGY
POWER MARKET
HEAT-PUMPS
EU ECONOMY
PRICES
WIND
Energy
09 Engineering
14 Economics
Publication Status
Published