How to manage a large and flexible nuclear set in a deregulated electricity market from the point of view of social welfare?

Pascal Gourdel and Maria Lykidi

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: In the case of a large nuclear set (like the French set), nuclear production needs to be flexible to adjust to the predicted evolutions of the energy demmand. Consequently, the dominant position of nuclear in the national energy mix makes it responsible for the overall equilibrium of the electricity system which is directly intertwined with social welfare. In a previous work, we looked at producers own profits (short-term, inter-temporal) considering the equality between supply and demand. Here, we proceed with a full optimization of the social welfare in an identical framework. Theoretically, the optimal production behaviour that maximizes social welfare is characterized by a constant thermal production and a totally flexible nuclear production given that the nuclear capacity is sufficient. Numerically, the significant amount of nuclear capacities compared with thermal capacities in the French electricity market leads to the same “paradoxical” production behaviour. Therefore, we conclude that social optimum is ensured within our model by investing sufficiently in nuclear capacity. The optimal production scheduling determined by the social welfare maximization problem and the optimal inter-temporal production problem are totally opposite

Keywords: Electric power; nuclear power plant; flexibility; nuclear fuel stock; thermal generation; social welfare; total cost minimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C63 D24 D41 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2014/14059.pdf (application/pdf)

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:mse:cesdoc:14059

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().