Taking aim at one of the largest greenhouse gas emitting sectors, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized new regulations on power plant greenhouse gas emissions in May 2024. These rules take the form of different emissions performance standards for different classes of power plant technologies, creating a complex set of regulations that make it difficult to understand their consequential impacts on power system capacity, operations, and emissions without dedicated and sophisticated modeling. Here, we enhance a state-of-the-art power system capacity expansion model by incorporating new detailed operational constraints tailored to different technologies to represent the EPA's rules. Our results show that adopting these new regulations could reduce US power sector emissions in 2040 to 51% below the 2022 level (vs 26% without the rules). Regulations on coal-fired power plants drive the largest share of reductions. Regulations on new gas turbines incrementally reduce emissions but lower overall efficiency of the gas fleet, increasing the average cost of carbon mitigation. Therefore, we explore several alternative emission mitigation strategies. By comparing these alternatives with regulations finalized by EPA, we highlight the importance of accelerating the retirement of inefficient fossil fuel-fired generators and applying consistent and strict emissions regulations to all gas generators, regardless of their vintage, to cost-effectively achieve deep decarbonization and avoid biasing investment decisions towards less efficient generators.
The price of solar panels is decreasing rapidly and governments around the world are investing in solar power plants to increase the portion of solar energy in the smart grid. The price of electricity produced by solar power plants is much cheaper than conventional thermal power plants and innovation in solar cells is further increasing the divide. Consequently, setting up solar power plants will decrease electricity spot prices on average. However, the topology of the power grid must be considered while setting up solar power plants so that full benefits of cheap solar power can be gained by …
Smart plant factories incorporate sensing technology, actuators and control algorithms to automate processes, reducing the cost of production while improving crop yield many times over that of traditional farms. This paper investigates the growth of lettuce (Lactuca Sativa) in a smart farming setup when exposed to red and blue light-emitting diode (LED) horticulture lighting. An image segmentation method based on K-means clustering is used to identify the size of the plant at each stage of growth, and the growth of the plant modelled in a feed forward network. Finally, an optimization algorith…
A multiple market trading mechanism for the VPP to participate in electricity, renewable energy certificate (REC) and carbon emission right (CER) markets is proposed. With the introduction of the inventory mechanism of REC and CER, the profit of the VPP increases and better trading decisions with multiple markets are made under the requirements of renewable portfolio standard (RPS) and carbon emission (CE) quota requirements. According to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of the proposed model, properties of the multiple market trading mechanism are discussed. Results from case studies v…
Renewable power to ammonia (RePtA) is a prominent zero-carbon pathway for decarbonization. Due to the imbalance between renewables and production energy demand, the RePtA system relies on the electricity exchange with the power grid. Participating in the electricity market as a virtual power plant (VPP) may help to reduce energy costs. However, the power profile of local photovoltaics and wind turbines is similar to those in the market, resulting in rising energy costs under the conventional strategy. Hence, we develop a multi-timescale trading strategy for the RePtA VPP in the electricity, hy…
Renewable energy such as solar and wind energy can solve the major problems of humanity such as electricity and fresh water. The renewable energy sources are promising to take a significant share in the energy sector as a viable option for integration with conventional fossil fuel power plants. In this paper, the production of 1 MW of electricity for several households in the city of Sirjan in southern Iran has been studied. The actual data required by the model including solar irradiation, air temperature, load profile, cost of energy for Sirjan, Iran have been utilized in the proposed model.…
The objective of this work is to reduce the storage dimensions required to operate a coupled photovoltaic (PV) and Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in an electricity market, while keeping the same level of performance. Performance is measured either with the amount of errors between the energy sold on the market and the actual generation of the PV/BESS i.e. the imbalance, or directly with the revenue generated on the electricity market from the PV/BESS operation. Two solutions are proposed and tested to reduce the BESS size requirement. The first solution is to participate in electricity m…
The information needed for fundamental modelling of the power markets -- the efficiency, start-up, fixed, and variable operating costs of each power plant -- is not publicly available. These parameters are usually estimated by considering the type of technology and the age of a power plant. We present a method to extract these parameters for thermal power plants on the British electricity market using only the publicly available data. For each power plant, we solve a bilevel optimisation problem, where the inner level solves the Unit Commitment (UC) problem and outputs the optimal schedule giv…
How flexible do we need to be? Using electricity systems models to identify optimal designs for flexible carbon capture storage system for gas-fired power plants
Distributed generation, based on the exploitation of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), has increased in the last few decades to limit anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and this trend will increase in the future. However, RES generation is not dispatchable, and an increasing share of RES may lead to inefficiencies and even problems for the electricity network. Flexible resources are needed to handle RES generation in order to support the delicate electricity generation and demand balance. Energy conversion technologies (P2X, Power to X) allow the flexibility of energy systems to be increase…
Power-to-Gas (P2G) has been one of the most frequently discussed technologies in the last few years. This technology allows producing CO2 free fuels. Thanks to its high flexibility, it may offer services to the power system, fostering Variable Renewable Energy Sources (VRES) and the electricity demand match, mitigating the issues related to VRES overproduction. The role of P2G plants connected to the transmission system as flexibility asset has been extensively analyzed in the literature. Conversely, the analysis of these systems used at distribution level has only been dealt with in a few stu…
In this article, we propose two-stage planning models for Electricity-Gas Coupled Integrated Energy System (EGC-IES), in which traditional thermal power plants (TTPPs) are considered to be retrofitted into carbon capture power plants (CCPPs), with power to gas (PtG) coupling CCPPs to gas system. The sizing and siting of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS)/PtG facilities, as well as the operation cost of TTPPs/CCPPs/gas sources/PtG, are all considered in the proposed model, including penalty on carbon emissions and revenue of CCUS. With changing policy on climate change and carbon em…
Climate change has been identified as one of the greatest challenges facing nations, governments, businesses and citizens of the globe. The threats of climate change demand an increase in the share of renewable energy from the total of energy generation. Meanwhile, there are tremendous efforts to decrease the reliance on fossil fuel energies which opens the venue for increasing the usage of alternative resources such as nuclear energy. Many countries (e.g. Egypt) are planning to meet increasing electricity demands by increasing both renewable (especially wind energy) and nuclear energies contr…
The intermittent nature of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar causes the energy supply to be less predictable leading to possible mismatches in the power network. To this end, hydrogen production and storage can provide a solution by increasing flexibility within the system. Stored hydrogen can either be converted back to electricity or it can be used as feed-stock for industry, heating for built environment, and as fuel for vehicles. This research examines the optimal strategies for operating integrated energy systems consisting of renewable energy production and hydrogen stora…
In this paper, an approach to evaluate the benefits of demand flexibility for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) is presented. The flexible demands chosen in this study are part of a renewable energy source-based VPP that participates in Day-Ahead Market (DAM) and Intra-Day Market (IDM) and has dispatchable and non-dispatchable assets. A demand model with bi-level flexibility is proposed: the first level is associated with DAM, whereas the second level is related to IDM sessions. Simulations are carried out considering a 12-node network to ascertain the eventual impacts of modeling demand flexibility…
This work presents a suite of two optimisation models for the short-term scheduling and redispatch of a virtual power plant (VPP) composed of a wind farm and a Li-ion battery, that participates in the day-ahead energy and secondary regulation reserve markets of the Iberian electricity market. First, a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear programming model is used to obtain the VPP's generation and reserve schedule and the opportunity cost of the energy stored in the battery. The model has an hourly resolution and a look-ahead period beyond the markets' scheduling horizon and considers the…
Low carbon optimal scheduling of integrated energy system considering waste heat utilization under the coordinated operation of incineration power plant and P2G
This paper will propose a novel technique for optimize hydropower plant in small scale based on load frequency control (LFC) which use self-tuning fuzzy Proportional- Derivative (PD) method for estimation and prediction of planning. Due to frequency is not controlled by any dump load or something else, so this power plant is under dynamic frequency variations that will use PD controller which optimize by fuzzy rules and then with neural deep learning techniques and Genetic Algorithm optimization. The main purpose of this work is because to maintain frequency in small-hydropower plant at nomina…
The notion of Virtual Power Plant (VPP) has been used many times in last years in power systems and for several reasons. As a general trend, the behavior of a classic synchronous generator is to be emulated for a class of conventional grid components like, e.g., renewable generators or/and power electronic units. Most of the times production of these units is of interest, as it is the case for the new AGC scheme of Spain which, from this point of view, looks like a VPP. However, dynamic aspects are of high importance, especially for increasing the actual rate of penetration of Renewable Energy…
The assessment of adequacy and security of the energy system requires the detailed knowledge of physical and operational characteristics. In contrast, studies concerning energy transitions employ stylized models that oftentimes ignore the technical properties but have a lasting influence on long-term energy policies. This paper investigates the gap between energy system planning and operational models by linking these two perspectives: (1) a long-term investment model with low spatial resolution and high level of aggregation, and (2) a spatially resolved system security model that captures the…
In many parts of the world, electric power systems have seen a significant shift towards generation from renewable energy and natural gas. Because of their ability to flexibly adjust power generation in real time, gas-fired power plants are frequently seen as the perfect partner for variable renewable generation. However, this reliance on gas generation increases interdependence and propagates uncertainty between power grids and gas pipelines, and brings coordination and uncertainty management challenges. To address these issues, we propose an uncertainty management framework for uncertain, bu…
