Challenges and costs of integrating high shares of Variable Renewable Energy technologies in operating electricity systems

Presenter: Mr Gabriel Rioseco
Abstract: Future electricity systems will likely experience a substantial increase in the share of low carbon technologies as solar PV and wind. In this context, numerous studies have modelled national or regional electricity systems with high VRE shares, however little research has been done on studying the real challenges, costs and implications of having a system with a high VRE penetration and the bottlenecks that might arise that could limit the transition to a low carbon electricity system. As VRE technologies are variable and uncertain, their integration cause a series of technical and economic impacts on the system (termed VRE Integration costs) that needs to be fully measured and captured for understanding the real implications of decarbonising the electricity system. These impacts can be technical (e.g., VRE generation increasing ramping and cycling of thermal plants) and/or economic (e.g., increasing storage requirements, or reducing the utilization rate of thermal plants affecting their capital recovery factor). Thus, this research project aims to estimate the integration costs and challenges of increasing VRE shares in the system. For this, the whole Australian NEM is modelled with a long term capacity planning model (for capturing the long term economic/investment impacts) with an embedded operational model (for capturing the technical behaviour of the units in the system), so that the full range of impacts and integration costs can be captured when increasing the share of VRE technologies in the electricity system.