Gone with the wind? -- Electricity market prices and incentives to invest in thermal power plants under increasing wind energy supply
Thure Traber and
Claudia Kemfert
Energy Economics, 2011, vol. 33, issue 2, 249-256
Abstract:
The increased wind energy supplied to many electricity markets around the world has to be balanced by reliably ramping units or other complementary measures when wind conditions are low. At the same time wind energy impacts both, the utilization of thermal power plants and the market prices. While the market prices tend to decrease, the impact on the utilization of different plant types is at the outset unclear. To analyze the incentives to invest in thermal power plants under increased wind energy supply, we develop a computational model which includes ramping restrictions and costs and apply it to the German case. We find that due to current wind supply the market prices are reduced by more than five percent, and the incentives to invest in natural gas fired units are largely reduced. An increased wind supply erodes their attractiveness further. Consequently, a gap between the need for and the incentive to provide flexibility can be expected.
Keywords: Electricity; market; modeling; Start-up; costs; Wind; energy; Oligopoly (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (120)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140-9883(10)00111-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Gone with the Wind?: Electricity Market Prices and Incentives to Invest in Thermal Power Plants under Increasing Wind Energy Supply (2009) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:33:y:2011:i:2:p:249-256
Access Statistics for this article
Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant
More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().