Energy System Modelling: Power Plant Dispatch and Electricity Generation Costs

The growing share of intermittent renewable energy on the electricity production has also an influence on the remaining thermal power plants. The full load hours, especially of fossil fired power plants, are decreasing over time. In the meantime, the energy surplus produced by renewable sources is increasing and without building new controllable power plants, the back-up capacity is decreasing because old fossil fired power plants will shut down. A lot of modelling has been done in this field yielding to very different results. This paper shows a generic approach to the calculation of the power plant dispatch and the electricity generation cost. The main focus is on the influence different scenario assumptions can have on the outcome of the investigation. The aim is to show how important an extensive sensitivity analyses is. As the ambitious climate targets of the government, the strong development of intermittent renewable energies as well as the nuclear phase out provide very good scenarios, the model will be explained on the example of Germany.