In order to find politically feasible ways to reduce greenhouse gas emission emissions, governments must examine how policies affect a variety of stakeholders. The costs and benefits of low carbon technology options are unique and affect different market participants in different ways. In this thesis, we examine the cost effectiveness of carbon mitigation technologies and policies from the social perspective and from the perspective of consumers. In Chapter 2, we perform an engineering-economic analysis of hybridizing concentrating solar thermal power with fossil fuel. We examine the cost effectiveness of substituting the solar power for new coal or gas and find the cost of mitigation to be approximately ~$130/tCO2 to ~$300/tCO2. In Chapter 3, we quantify some externalized social costs and benefits of wind energy. We estimate the costs due to variability and transmission unique to wind to have an expected value of ~$20/MWh. In Chapter 4, we quantify the cost effectiveness of a renewable portfolio standard and a carbon price from the perspective of consumers in restructured markets. We find that both that the RPS can be more cost effective than a carbon price for consumers under certain circumstances: continued excess supply of capacity, retention of nuclear generators, and high natural gas prices. In Chapter 5, we examine the implications of lowering electricity sector CO2 emissions in PJM through a Low Carbon Capacity Standard (LCCS). We estimate that an LCCS would supply the same amount of energy (105,000 GWh) as the RPS’s in PJM and an additional ~10 GW of capacity. We find that the LCCS could be more cost effective for consumers than an RPS if it lowered capacity prices.

The ongoing process of deregulation in energy markets changes the market from a monopoly into a complex one, in which large utilities and independent power producers are no longer suppliers with guaranteed returns but enterprisers which have to compete. This competence has forced utilities to improve their efficiency. In effect, they must still manage the challenges of physical delivery while operating in a complex market characterized by significant volatility, volumetric uncertainty and credit risk. In such an environment, risk management gains more importance than ever. In order to manage risk, first it must be measured and then this quantified risk must be utilized optimally. Using stochastic programming to construct a model for an energy company in liberalized markets is useful since it provides a generic framework to model the uncertainties and enable decisions that will perform well. However, the resulting stochastic programming problem is a large-scale one and decomposition techniques are needed to solve them.

Après avoir montré l’existence d’un impact inflationniste des biocarburants de première génération sur les prix agricoles via un renforcement du lien entre les prix agricoles et du pétrole, nous soulignons l’absence d’un réel effet positif de leur expansion sur les économies émergentes et en développement. De plus, la hausse des prix agricoles a contraint certains pays importateurs de ces produits agricoles à mettre en place des politiques de protection de leurs marchés domestiques. Ces résultats prouve qu’il s’avère impératif de développer une production de biocarburants ne nécessitant pas de matières premières à visée alimentaire. Or, nous mettons en évidence la préférence de la population française pour ces biocarburants de deuxième génération, d’autant plus pour une production issue de résidus agricoles. Enfin, nous établissons – en prenant l’exemple d’un marché américain – que la mise en place de marchés dérivés des biocarburants en Europe pourrait permettre aux industriels de se protéger efficacement face à la volatilité des prix. / Having shown the existence of an inflationary impact of first-generation biofuels on agricultural prices through a stronger link between agricultural and oil prices, we highlight the lack of a real positive effect of their expansion on the emerging and developing economies. In addition, the rise in agricultural prices has required some importing countries of these agricultural products to implement policy measures to protect their domestic markets. These results prove that it is imperative to develop a production of biofuels that do not use food crops. However, we highlight the preference of the French population for these second-generation biofuels, especially for a production based on agricultural residuals. Finally, we establish – using the example of the US market of ethanol – that the establishment of biofuel derivatives markets in Europe could enable industrials to protect themselves efficiently against price volatility.

abstract: This research develops heuristics for scheduling electric power production amid uncertainty. Reliability is becoming more difficult to manage due to growing uncertainty from renewable resources. This challenge is compounded by the risk of resource outages, which can occur any time and without warning. Stochastic optimization is a promising tool but remains computationally intractable for large systems. The models used in industry instead schedule for the forecast and withhold generation reserve for scenario response, but they are blind to how this reserve may be constrained by network congestion. This dissertation investigates more effective heuristics to improve economics and reliability in power systems where congestion is a concern. Two general approaches are developed. Both approximate the effects of recourse decisions without actually solving a stochastic model. The first approach procures more reserve whenever approximate recourse policies stress the transmission network. The second approach procures reserve at prime locations by generalizing the existing practice of reserve disqualification. The latter approach is applied for feasibility and is later extended to limit scenario costs. Testing demonstrates expected cost improvements around 0.5%-1.0% for the IEEE 73-bus test case, which can translate to millions of dollars per year even for modest systems. The heuristics developed in this dissertation perform somewhere between established deterministic and stochastic models: providing an economic benefit over current practices without substantially increasing computational times. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 2015

abstract: This dissertation carries out an inter-disciplinary research of operations research, statistics, power system engineering, and economics. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on a special power system scheduling problem, a unit commitment problem with uncertainty. This scheduling problem is a two-stage decision problem. In the first stage, system operator determines the binary commitment status (on or off) of generators in advance. In the second stage, after the realization of uncertainty, the system operator determines generation levels of the generators. The goal of this dissertation is to develop computationally-tractable methodologies and algorithms to solve large-scale unit commitment problems with uncertainty. In the first part of this dissertation, two-stage models are studied to solve the problem. Two solution methods are studied and improved: stochastic programming and robust optimization. A scenario-based progressive hedging decomposition algorithm is applied. Several new hedging mechanisms and parameter selections rules are proposed and tested. A data-driven uncertainty set is proposed to improve the performance of robust optimization. In the second part of this dissertation, a framework to reduce the two-stage stochastic program to a single-stage deterministic formulation is proposed. Most computation of the proposed approach can be done by offline studies. With the assistance of offline analysis, simulation, and data mining, the unit commitment problems with uncertainty can be solved efficiently. Finally, the impacts of uncertainty on energy market prices are studied. A new component of locational marginal price, a marginal security component, which is the weighted shadow prices of the proposed security constraints, is proposed to better represent energy prices. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 2016

abstract: This thesis focuses on developing an integrated transmission and distribution framework that couples the two sub-systems together with due consideration to conventional demand flexibility. The proposed framework ensures accurate representation of the system resources and the network conditions when modeling the distribution system in the transmission OPF and vice-versa. It is further used to develop an accurate pricing mechanism (Distribution-based Location Marginal Pricing), which is reflective of the moment-to-moment costs of generating and delivering electrical energy, for the distribution system. By accurately modeling the two sub-systems, we can improve the economic efficiency and the system reliability, as the price sensitive resources can be controlled to behave in a way that benefits the power system as a whole. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2014

This report aims to make a comparison between the Swedish and Spanish electricity market, the design of new improvements that could achieve a better operation for both markets as well as the price forecasting for both spot markets. These enhancements are oriented to decrease electricity prices, energy use and the system CO2 emissions. Also, the main organizations of the market and their roles has been characterized, clarifying the functions of the Market Operator and the System Operator. In addition, the different markets, the trading products and the price formation have been explained and the picture of the market structure has been achieved with enough depth. Moreover, some of the most used methods in Time Series Analysis has been enumerated to understand which techniques are needed for forecast the electricity prices and the methodology used (Box-Jenkins Method) has been explained in detail. Later, all these methods have been implemented in an own code developed in Python 3.6 (TSAFTools .py) with the help of different statistics libraries mentioned during the method chapter. On the other hand, the description of the market situation has been carried out for both countries. Power installed capacity, electricity generation, average prices, main renewable technologies and policies to increase the renewable energy share has been analysed and corresponding described. Then, to estimate the market’s future spot electricity prices, ARIMA models have been selected to analyse the evolution of the day-ahead price using the TSAFTools.py. The final models show a proper performance in the two markets, especially in the Nordpool, achieving an RMSE: 37.68 and MAPE: 7.75 for the year in 2017 in Nordpool and a RMSE: 270.08 and MAPE: 20.24 in OMIE for 2017. Nordpool spot prices from 2015 to 2016 has been analysed too but obtaining a result not as good as the year 2017 with an RMSE: 49.01 and MAPE: 21.42. After this analysis, the strengths and weaknesses of both markets are presented and the main problems of the Spanish electricity system (power overcapacity, fuel dependency, non-cost-efficient renewable energies policies, lack of interconnexion capacity etc.) and the Swedish electricity system (dependency for nuclear power, uncertainty for solar electricity Generation) are presented. Finally, due to the quick development of the energy sector in the last years and the concern of the European Committee to reach a new design for the electricity market, different kinds of recommendations for the future have been considered.

During the last decade there has been an increase in renewable energy companies. At the same time, propositions have been put forward worldwide in order to restrict the possibilities for expansion for energy companies with their focus on oil and gas. This study aims to analyse the potential spillover effects between oil and renewable energy stocks on the Nordic Stock markets in order to explain how these events might affect investors abilities to predict potential gains in the markets. Spillover effects are characterized by seemingly unrelated events in one market having an impact on another. Similar studies have been conducted in countries that have a large dependency on oil as their means of energy. However, with the Nordic region being on the forefront when it comes to renewable energy globally, the aim was to see if there would be similar effects between the different sectors between different countries. The study utilized Market Capitalization based indexes for both types of stocks and examined the correlations between them during different time periods. This in order to find trends related to different time periods that could open up for different investment opportunities depending on the user. As the study showed, there were significantly negative correlations between the indexes in favour of the renewable market. However, these correlations were not true for all time periods within the study and could therefore not be confirmed as a definite result.

No description available.

Energy systems are evolving into structures in which the role of the consumer is more and more significant. Consumers are no longer the passive entities that in the past had to be supplied in an unidirectional way (from the network to the customer), but can also supply power to the grid through renewable resources, storage capacity through the batteries of their electric vehicles or operating services through the use of their flexibility. However, when discussing on smart grids, electricity supply and consump-tion are the only considered side on many occasions, neglecting other dimensions such as natural gas, sanitary hot water or transport. In this context, this dissertation represents a novel approach to the role of consumers in the natural gas sector. While it is true that electricity consumers have been involved for years in different operation services related to the use of their flexibility (especial-ly in countries such as the United States and more recently in the European Union), the use of demand response resources in the gas sector has been so far non-existent. However, the success of demand response initiatives in electricity systems and their similarity to the gas sector, where their regulatory and technological development has been carried out in parallel in recent years, allows us to expect similar successful re-sults when implementing equivalent programs to gas networks. This dissertation highlights the huge potential that remains unexplored on the demand side of natural gas, which could be used by gas network operators for the solution of technical constraints, balance services or optimization of programming of under-ground storage. This potential is especially interesting at the moment, when the mas-sive installation of smart gas meters has started in some European countries, an infra-structure that would facilitate the use of demand response resources for the better op-eration of gas networks. The dissertation presents, firstly, an exhaustive analysis of the demand response pro-grams currently used in electrical systems around the world, identifying those services that could be equally applicable to the gas sector. The traditional structure based on which gas systems have been developed in different countries is analyzed below. In order to make better use of resources and to optimize its operation, an architecture based on the concept of smart grid is then proposed, identifying the agents that would participate in this structure and emphasizing the role that consumers would play, not only as energy demanders, but also as providers of network services. This active role of demand requires the use of adequate measurement, control and communication technologies, aspect that is also properly analyzed. Based on the results of the analysis mentioned above, this thesis proposes a new meth-odology for the development and evaluation of demand response mechanisms that allow a greater participation of gas consumers in the provision of operating services to the manager of the network, increasing the joint efficiency of the system and reducing the costs associated with such services. The proposed methodology has been successfully applied to the gas network in Italy, where the analyzed operation services have been evaluated in a town of 16,000 inhab-itants located in the central north-Italian area. In that town, consumers have been grouped by end-use, sector and size, which evidences the need to enhance the role of the aggregator for the proper use of the potential of smaller consumers, whether they receive a gas supply directly or through a distributed heat network. The results presented in this dissertation should encourage regulators to empower the use of the consumers' flexibility in order to increase the efficiency of the natural gas system, as it reduces operating costs while favoring the participation of customers in a more dynamic energy structure. / Los sistemas energéticos están evolucionando hacia estructuras en las que el papel desempeñado por el consumidor es cada vez más importante. Hoy en día, los consumidores ya no son los entes pasivos de antaño a los que había que suministrar energía de forma unidireccional (de la red al cliente), sino que también pueden suministrar energía a la red a través de recursos renovables, capacidad de almacenamiento mediante las baterías de sus vehículos eléctricos o servicios de operación a través de la utilización de su flexibilidad. Sin embargo, al hablar de redes inteligentes, en muchas ocasiones se sobreentiende únicamente lo relativo al suministro y consumo de electricidad, obviando otras dimensiones como pueden ser el gas natural, el agua caliente sanitaria o el transporte. En este marco, esta tesis supone un enfoque novedoso en lo que se refiere al papel de los consumidores en el sector del gas natural. Si bien es cierto que los consumidores de electricidad han participado desde hace años en diferentes servicios relacionados con el uso de su flexibilidad, la utilización de la respuesta de la demanda en el sector gasista ha sido hasta ahora inexistente. Sin embargo, el éxito de iniciativas de respuesta de la demanda en los sistemas eléctricos y su similitud con el sector gasista, cuyo desarrollo normativo y tecnológico se ha realizado en paralelo en los últimos años, permite esperar resultados igualmente exitosos al aplicar programas equivalentes a las redes de gas. Esta tesis pone de manifiesto el enorme potencial que permanece inexplorado en el lado de la demanda de gas natural, el cual podría ser utilizado para la solución de restricciones técnicas, servicios de balance u optimización de la programación de los almacenamientos subterráneos. Este potencial resulta especialmente interesante en estos momentos, cuando en algunos países europeos se ha comenzado la instalación masiva de contadores inteligentes de gas. La tesis presenta un análisis exhaustivo de los programas de respuesta de la demanda utilizados en la actualidad en sistemas eléctricos alrededor del mundo, identificándose aquellos servicios que podrían ser aplicables al sector gasista. A continuación se analiza la estructura tradicional en base a la que los sistemas gasistas se han desarrollado en diversos países, proponiéndose a continuación una arquitectura basada en el concepto de red inteligente, donde se identifican los agentes que participarían en esta estructura y se enfatiza el rol que los consumidores desempeñarían no sólo como demandantes de energía, sino también como proveedores de servicios de red. Este papel activo de la demanda necesita de la utilización de tecnologías de medición, control y comunicación adecuadas, aspecto que también se analiza en detalle. En base a los resultados del análisis mencionado, esta tesis propone una nueva metodología para el desarrollo y evaluación de mecanismos de respuesta de la demanda que permitan una mayor participación de los consumidores de gas en la provisión de servicios de operación al gestor de la red, aumentando la eficiencia conjunta del sistema y reduciendo los costes asociados a dichos servicios. La metodología propuesta ha sido aplicada con éxito a la red gasista de Italia, donde los servicios de operación analizados han sido evaluados en una ciudad de 16.000 habitantes, donde los consumidores han sido agrupados por uso final, sector y tamaño. Esto ha puesto de manifiesto la necesidad de potenciar el papel del agregador para valorizar el potencial de los consumidores más pequeños, tanto si reciben un suministro de gas directo o a través de una red de calor distribuido. Los resultados expuestos en esta tesis deberían impulsar a los reguladores a incentivar la utilización de la flexibilidad de los consumidores a fin de incrementar la eficiencia del sistema de gas natural, ya que reduce los costes de operación al tiempo que favorece la particip / Els sistemes energètics estan evolucionant cap a estructures en què el paper exercit pel consumidor és cada vegada més important. Avui dia, els consumidors ja no són els ens passius d'antany als quals calia subministrar energia de forma unidireccional (de la xarxa al client), sinó que també poden subministrar energia a la xarxa a través de recursos renovables, capacitat d'emmagatzematge mitjançant les bateries dels seus vehicles elèctrics o serveis d'operació a través de la utilització de la seva flexibilitat. No obstant això, en parlar de xarxes intel·ligents, en moltes ocasions se sobreentén únicament quant al subministrament i consum d'electricitat, obviant altres dimensions com poden ser el gas natural, l'aigua calenta sanitària o el transport. En aquest marc, aquesta tesi suposa un enfocament nou pel que fa al paper dels consumidors en el sector del gas natural. Si bé és cert que els consumidors d'electricitat han participat des de fa anys en diferents serveis d'operació relacionats amb l'ús de la seva flexibilitat, la utilització de la resposta de la demanda en el sector gasista ha estat fins ara inexistent. No obstant això, l'èxit d'iniciatives de resposta de la demanda en els sistemes elèctrics i la seva similitud amb el sector gasista, el desenvolupament normatiu i tecnològic s'ha realitzat en paral·lel en els últims anys, permet esperar resultats igualment reeixits en aplicar programes equivalents a les xarxes de gas. Aquesta tesi posa de manifest l'enorme potencial que roman inexplorat en el costat de la demanda de gas natural, el qual podria ser utilitzat per a la solució de restriccions tècniques, serveis de balanç o optimització de la programació dels emmagatzematges subterranis. Aquest potencial és especialment interessant en aquests moments, quan en alguns països europeus s'ha començat la instal·lació massiva de comptadors intel·ligents de gas. La tesi presenta una anàlisi exhaustiva dels programes de resposta de la demanda utilitzats en l'actualitat en sistemes elèctrics voltant del món, identificant-se aquells serveis que podrien ser aplicables al sector gasista. A continuació s'analitza l'estructura tradicional sobre la base de la qual els sistemes gasistes s'han desenvolupat en diversos països, proposant-se a continuació una arquitectura basada en el concepte de xarxa intel·ligent, on s'identifiquen els agents que participarien en aquesta estructura i s'emfatitza el paper que els consumidors exercirien no només com a demandants d'energia, sinó també com a proveïdors de serveis de xarxa. Aquest paper actiu de la demanda necessita de la utilització de tecnologies de mesurament, control i comunicació adequades, aspecte que també s'analitza en detall. En base als resultats de l'anàlisi esmentat, aquesta tesi proposa una nova metodologia per al desenvolupament i avaluació de mecanismes de resposta de la demanda que permetin una major participació dels consumidors de gas a la provisió de serveis d'operació al gestor de la xarxa, augmentant l'eficiència conjunta del sistema i reduint els costos associats a aquests serveis. La metodologia proposada ha estat aplicada amb èxit a la xarxa gasista d'Itàlia, on els serveis d'operació analitzats han estat avaluats en una ciutat de 16.000 habitants, on els consumidors han estat agrupats per ús final, sector i grandària. Això ha posat de manifest la necessitat de potenciar el paper de l'agregador per valoritzar el potencial dels consumidors més petits, tant si reben un subministrament de gas directe o mitjançant una xarxa de calor distribuïda. Els resultats exposats en aquesta tesi haurien d'impulsar els reguladors a incentivar la utilització de la flexibilitat dels consumidors a fi d'incrementar l'eficiència del sistema de gas natural, ja que redueix els costos d'operació i alhora afavoreix la participació dels clients en una estructura més dinàmica. / Montuori, L. (2017). Application of demand response strategies for the management of natural gas systems under the smart grid configuration: development of a methodology for technical, economic and environmental evaluation [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/90407