CO2 Abatement from RES Injections in the German Electricity Sector: Does a CO2 Price Help?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The overlapping impact of the Emission Trading System (ETS) and renewable energy (RE) deployment targets creates a classic case of interaction effects. Whereas the price interaction is widely recognized and has been thoroughly discussed, the effect of an overlapping instrument on the abatement attributable to an instrument has gained little attention. This paper estimates the actual reduction in demand for European Union Allowances that has occurred due to RE deployment focusing on the German electricity sector, for the five years 2006 through 2010. Based on a unit commitment model we estimate that CO2 emissions from the electricity sector are reduced by 33 to 57 Terms of use: Documents inMtons, or 10% to 16% of what estimated emissions would have been without any RE policy.Furthermore, we find that the abatement attributable to RE injections is greater in the presence of an allowance price than otherwise. The same holds for the ETS effect in presence of RE injection. This interaction effect is consistently positive for the German electricity system, at least for these years, and on the order of 0.5% to 1.5% of emissions.

Renewable Energy Incentives and Co2 Abatement in Italy

“…European electricity systems found similar results (Weigt et al, 2012;Delarue et al, 2010). In order to reproduce an historically realistic outcome, we calibrate the model by reducing coal plant availability.…”

The Implicit Carbon Price of Renewable Energy: Incentives in Germany

“…Regarding cycling costs, we restrict our analysis only to the start-up cost, which is the cost of the additional fuel needed to start-up the plant, because the model of Weigt et al (2012) does not consider other cycling costs. 10 As it was done for fuel cost saving, we calculate the additional start-up cost due to wind(solar) as the difference of start-up costs in the OBS scenario and No…”

“…(3) because the remuneration for RE and the deployment of RE capacity, depends only on the REI and not on the carbon price. Weigt et al (2012) have shown that, in Germany for the period 2006-2010, there is an interaction in the emission abatement between the injection of RE and the EU ETS: the CO2 abatement induced by the presence of both the carbon price and the injection of RE is on average higher than sum of the CO2 abatement due only to RE plus the CO2 abatement due only to the EU ETS. However this interaction tends to be very small and their model shows that:…”

“…the estimation of the fuel cost saving and carbon cost saving we make use of the model ofWeigt et al (2012). This is a deterministic unit commitment model of the German electricity market for the period 2006-2010.…”

When will wind energy achieve grid parity in China? – Connecting technological learning and climate finance

“…Previous studies evaluated the abatement cost of technology substitution using a static approach that does not consider the evolution of technology [17,18]. This study consists of computing the abatement cost over the whole period of wind energy grid parity.…”