Flexibility in electric power planning: Coping with demand uncertainty

Douglas T. Gardner

Energy, 1996, vol. 21, issue 12, 1207-1218

Abstract: Future electricity demand is a key source of uncertainty facing electric utility system planners. Flexibility offers one way to cope. Making use of the flexibility measure proposed by Hobbs, Honious and Bluestein, we first discuss what factors are of importance for determining flexibility benefits of different utility resources when dealing with demand uncertainty. A multistage stochastic electric utility planning model is then used to compare the flexibility benefits of different electric utility resources for a representative utility, Ontario Hydro. In the absence of acid-gas (i.e. NOx and SO2) emission constraints, gas combustion turbines and demand-side management (DSM) were found to offer significant flexibility benefits, while nuclear generation has a large flexibility disbenefit. With acid-gas emission constraints in place, the flexibility benefit of gas combustion turbines is greatly reduced, while those of nuclear, DSM and gas combined-cycle generation all increase. A key finding is that flexibility benefits (or disbenefits) comprise a major portion of the total expected economic benefits of different utility resources in many cases. This result implies that analyses that neglect the effects of demand uncertainty may either dramatically underestimate or overestimate the expected economic benefits of different utility resources.

Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0360544296000618
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:energy:v:21:y:1996:i:12:p:1207-1218

DOI: 10.1016/0360-5442(96)00061-8

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().