Optimal Energy Mix with Renewable Portfolio Standards in Korea

Abstract

Korea is a heavily energy-dependent country whose primary energy consumption ranks ninth in the world. However, at the same time, it promised to reduce carbon emission and planned to use more renewable energy. Thus, the objective of this study is to propose an optimal energy mix planning model in electricity generation from various energy sources, such as gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, photovoltaic, and biomass, which considers more renewable and sustainable portions by imposing governmental regulation named renewable portfolio standard (RPS). This optimization model minimizes various costs such as construction cost, operation and management cost, fuel cost, and carbon emission cost while satisfying minimal demand requirement, maximal annual installation potential, and renewable portfolio standard constraints. Results showed that this optimization model could successfully generate energy mix plan from 2012 to 2030 while minimizing the objective costs and satisfying all the constraints. Therefore, this optimization model contributes more efficient and objective method to the complex decision-making process with a sustainability option. This proposed energy mix model is expected to be applied not only to Korea, but also to many other countries in the future for more economical planning of their electricity generation while affecting climate change less.

A Demand-Side Perspective on Developing a Future Electricity Generation Mix: Identifying Heterogeneity in Social Preferences

“…This implies that when developing mid-and long-term electricity mix it is necessary to consider external costs of each power source as means for ensuring public support for it. On the other hand, in the case of the electricity mix proposed by Geem and Kim [18], the share of renewables was only 13.0% even if it included Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) constraints. Our study predicted that Korean consumers are likely to want more than 18.5% of renewable share according to the scenarios.…”

“…Most programs such as WASP IV, EMCAS, UPLAN, and AURORAxmp use such functions [25,26]. On the other hand, recent studies have considered not only such nominal costs of power generation but also the external costs or policy objectives-such as environmental effects [6][7][8][9], energy security [2,10,11], related risk [3,[12][13][14], future uncertainty [15], and other energy policy goals [16][17][18]-as additional constraints. Most of these studies utilize a multi-objective optimization model or portfolio theory.…”

“…Examples of such external costs include human health problems, environmental degradation, energy security, dangers of a major accident with a power plant, etc. In recent years, recognition and responsibility for such external costs of electricity and their internalization have become an important policy issue [5], and thus, recent studies have proposed an electricity mix developed under various constraints [2,3,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. This context might explain the global phenomenon in which the proportion of renewable energy is increasing even though it has a lower economic feasibility than conventional energy sources.…”

“…With regard to Korea's optimal electricity mix based on the year 2030, Ahn et al [14] proposed 19.20-24.58% for coal, 27.97-37.20% for LNG, 26.63-33.08% for nuclear energy, and 13.92-20.80% for renewables; in addition, Geem and Kim [18] proposed 21.1% for coal, 26.9% for LNG, 39.0% for nuclear energy, and 13.0% for renewables. The electricity mix in this study's Scenario 1, which did not assume technological progress for renewables, was 19.8% for coal, 17.6% for LNG, 11.2% for oil, 32.9% for nuclear energy, and 18.5% for renewables.…”

Optimal Design of a Residential Photovoltaic Renewable System in South Korea

“…South Korea is in the world's top 10 energy-consuming countries, and it heavily depends on imports of fossil fuels (natural gas, coal, and oil) [1][2][3]. Due to recent public awareness regarding the issue of polluted air, pressure to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels has increased.…”