Renewables, nuclear, or fossil fuels? Scenarios for Great Britain’s power system considering costs, emissions and energy security

By Stefan Pfenninger, James Keirstead. 2015

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mitigating climate change is driving the need to decarbonize the electricity sector, for which various possible technological options exist, alongside uncertainty over which options are preferable in terms of cost, emissions reductions, and energy security. To reduce this uncertainty, we here quantify two questions for the power system of Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland): First, when compared within the same high-resolution modeling framework, how much do different combinations of technologies differ in these three respects? Second, how strongly does the cost and availability of grid-scale storage affect overall system cost, and would it favor some technology combinations above others? We compare three main possible generation technologies: (1) renewables, (2) nuclear, and (3) fossil fuels (with/without carbon capture and storage). Our results show that across a wide range of these combinations, the overall costs remain similar, implying that different configurations are equally feasible both technically and economically. However, the most economically favorable scenarios are not necessarily favorable in terms of emissions or energy security. The availability of grid-scale storage in scenarios with little dispatchable generation can reduce overall levelized electricity cost by up to 50%, depending on storage capacity costs. The UK can rely on its domestic wind and solar PV generation at lower renewable shares, with levelized costs only rising more than 10% above the mean of 0.084 GBP/kWh for shares of 50% and below at a 70% share, which is 35% higher. However, for more than an 80% renewable generation share to be economically feasible, large-scale storage, significantly more power imports, or domestic dispatchable renewables like tidal range must be available.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Energy Engineering and Power Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/909831e681450e8cc94280560ed15b4c43572662

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Feasible path toward 40–100% renewable energy shares for power supply in France by 2050: A prospective analysis (2016, background): “They found that increasing VREs’ share up to 70% would only lead to a small cost increase compared to the optimal scenario, but that higher VRE shares would require grid-scale storage options, more imports, or the installation of dispatchable renewa bles [19].”
The future cost of electrical energy storage based on experience rates (2017, unknown): “Cumulative Spend (X) = ∫ (A X)dx (5) X2”
The critical role of the industrial sector in reaching long-term emission reduction, energy efficiency and renewable targets (2016, background): “A variety of studies have shown that renewable shares of up to 80% would be technically feasible ([66], [67] for the UK, [68] for the European Union) – and even at manageable cost.”
Towards Sustainable Energy: A Systematic Review of Renewable Energy Sources, Technologies, and Public Opinions (2019, background): “In terms of costs, emissions and energy security, the study [48] revealed that the cost for renewables, nuclear energy and fossil fuels are essentially the same; whereas energy security of up to 60% of variable renewable capacity is possible with little cost increase.”