Low carbon based power generation scheduling and generation planning

Abstract

Climate change has become one of the most serious challenges for human beings nowadays. Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission are considered as the main reason of the rising temperature and abnormal climate worldwide. As eager as people are to control the GHG emission and avoid excessive influences by more frequent extreme weathers, there are still barriers and difficulties that cannot be completely overcome at current stage. Both technical and political approaches operate in parallel to take the situation in control. It is estimated that the energy and heat industry contributes to nearly half of the overall GHG emission. It is of great significance to find a way that could efficiently reduce the emission of energy sector in the war fighting back global warming. In recent years, the penetration of renewable and other types of clean energy power generation increases largely. The effectiveness of emission reduction is observed. However, there are still some drawbacks of the increasing share of renewable and clean energy capacities that need to be taken into account, such as the intermittency of renewable generation outputs, low energy efficiency of emission reduction installations, high initial investment and etc. From the power system aspect, system economy and operation security issues are as well must-concern. High percentage of renewable exceeding the volume that current system could handle may seriously compromise system economy and security, which contradicts to the principle of sustainable development. Therefore, as many researchers and associated parties focusing on finding out the maximum percentage of renewable generations current system could take, it is also important to determine that emission reduction potential of current generation mix, as well as appropriate generation expansion plans under low carbon footprint without sacrificing too much on system economy and operation security.

In this thesis, we try to look at the low carbon power system operation and generation expansion planning problem from the policy-related aspect. The reactions of power market under GHG emission concerns are as well addressed. In order to simulation result more realistic and convincing, we collected the practical operation data of different types of generation units, the fuel consumption and emission features are than obtained by calculation. We also prepare the topology of Guangdong power network to test the optimization model we formulated corresponding to different kinds of emission-related mechanisms, including carbon taxes, feed-in tariffs, cap and trade, and renewable energy certificate trading. The reactions (changes of system generation schedules and generation marginal cost) are observed and analyzed. We also discuss the generation companies’ strategies of risk-aversion in multi-energy trading environment, as well as the rationality of currently implemented mechanisms. In addition, a generation expansion planning model is formulated with the implementation of different types of policy-guided mechanisms aforementioned respectively. The investment plan will show some interesting conclusions of how different mechanisms will affect the system development in different ways.

In summary, this thesis has established a comprehensive research plan of power systems interaction with different emission-related policies and mechanisms.