Establishing the Role That Wind Generation May Have in Future Generation Portfolios

Assessing the value of wind generation in future carbon constrained electricity industries

“…Furthermore, a carbon price will have no impact on these costs. Although the direct costs of wind power are currently higher than conventional technologies in most countries, it has been suggested that adding wind can help to hedge against fossil fuel and carbon price uncertainty, and therefore reduce the risk of generation portfolios (Awerbuch, 2006;Doherty et al, 2006). This paper employs a novel generation investment decision support tool developed in Vithayasrichareon and MacGill (2012a) to explore the potential impacts of increasing wind penetrations on the expected cost, associated cost uncertainty and carbon emissions of different future conventional generating plant portfolios.…”

Generation Portfolio Analysis for a Carbon Constrained and Uncertain Future

“…It is assumed that there is a maximum of 3800 MW of usable wind generation resource, enough to serve 22% of electricity demand. Further details of the least-cost portfolio analysis can be found in [8] and [9].…”

“…Intermittent, non-dispatchable sources of generation, like wind generation, make a different contribution to the generation adequacy of a system than conventional dispatchable generation. Capacity credit studies [8], [9] were undertaken for each generation type to ensure each portfolio has sufficient capacity to meet a Loss of Load Expectation, LOLE, of 8 hours per year [14]. Fig.…”

“…A linear programming portfolio optimization algorithm [8], [9] is used to find the mix of generation technologies that, for a given set of inputs, results in the load being met at leastcost. Issues of plant utilization, load duration and generation adequacy are included in the analysis.…”

“…Ireland also has one of the best wind resources in the world. This paper uses a methodology developed in [8] and [9] to determine least cost-generation portfolios for various scenarios in 2020. Issues of load duration, plant utilization and system capacity are dealt with in the analysis and the unique characteristics of wind generation are also accounted for.…”