Impacts of High Variable Renewable Energy Futures on Wholesale Electricity Prices, and on Electric-Sector Decision Making

Abstract

The underlying simulations were conducted with their suite of models tools including their long-term least-cost planning program, Gen-X, their market model, UPLAN-NPM, and their regional PLATO data models.

Reforming electricity rates to enable economically competitive electric trucking

“…In conclusion, our analysis shows that institutional innovations, such as electricity tariff reform, are needed to exploit the economic advantages of electric trucking that have emerged from advances in battery and fastcharging technologies. Although we explore the potential in CAISO and ERCOT, utilities and grid operators nationwide are experiencing similar trends that could support trucking electrification, including low wholesale electricity prices and stronger diurnal electricity price profiles-both driven in part by increasing renewable energy penetrations (Seel et al 2018). This analysis can be replicated for other regions using this methodology, depicted in figure 2.…”

“…We also analyze hourly demand and price projections for the year 2030 for both ISOs. The projection we analyze was built on a scenario of each ISO achieving 40% variable renewable energy (VRE) penetration with balanced amounts of wind and solar (Seel et al 2018). In this paper, we do not attempt to predict how the electricity system will evolve in response to higher EV penetrations; we instead use historical and forecasted scenarios as baselines to see where additional EV load could fit in.…”

“…The other development is the dramatically lower cost of electricity generation due in part to solar and wind technologies that are now at parity with or cheaper than coal generation on a levelized cost basis. While declining natural gas prices have played a larger role than renewables in depressing wholesale energy prices (Wiser et al 2017), high penetrations of renewables are expected to drive substantial drops in wholesale prices in the future (Seel et al 2018). These changes-coupled with the fact that several large automakers are developing multiple long-range electric truck models, and ultra-fast charging technologies are being commercialized-suggests that truck electrification is not unrealistic in the near to medium term.…”

Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector

“…Moreover, figure 5 shows that the cost implications of shed and shift measures depend heavily on the assumed magnitude and duration of peak savings for such measures, as well as assumed time-varying electricity rate structures. While the TOU rate shapes applied in this paper reflect current offerings from utilities, future rate structures may more heavily reward mid-day load increases [48], in which case pre-cooling measures would yield greater cost savings. Finally, while cost effectiveness was not the focus of the current analysis, measures that shed or shift loads may require lower incremental capital costs and thus deliver electricity savings more Figure 5.…”

“…12 Future work could incorporate more direct proxies for the time-varying costs of electricity supply, such as wholesale locational marginal pricing (LMP), into our time-sensitive valuation framework. This research should consider how different valuation approaches might adjust the estimated savings potential of efficiency and flexibility measures, especially under highrenewable energy penetration scenarios, which are expected to reshape temporal variations in LMP considerably [48].…”