“Energy production from renewables can be volatile, this also has implications for conventional power plants. We investigated how the start-up costs might develop in Germany until 2030”, Michael Pahle from PIK explains. The study shows that start-up costs increase because of more volatile electricity supply from wind power and solar photovoltaics, but they remain on a rather low level. Different drivers can be separated: start-up costs not only increase because of renewable expansion, but also because of increasing fuel and carbon prices, for example. Other factors have an opposite effect: “Additional storage and flexible electricity generation from biomass both decrease start-up costs” says lead author Wolf-Peter Schill from DIW Berlin.
The joint project of DIW Berlin and PIK was supported by Stiftung Mercator and Agora Energiewende. Model code and input parameters of the open-source power market model are available at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.259476
Article: Wolf-Peter Schill, Michael Pahle and Christian Gambardella (2017): Start-up costs of thermal power plants in markets with increasing shares of variable renewable generation. Nature Energy [doi:10.1038/nenergy.2017.50]
Weblink to the article:
http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201750
