Designing a regulatory tool for coordinated investment in renewable and conventional generation capacities considering market equilibria

Abstract

Environmental concerns and energy security issues have led to the rapid growth of renewable capacities in the power sector. With the increase in the penetration of renewables, conventional generations such as thermal technologies have faced the decreased market prices, reduced volume of sold energies and thus diminished revenues. The decrease in the interests for investment in conventional capacities resulting from revenue deficiency from one side and high penetration of non-dispatchable renewables such as wind and solar generations from the other side may hinder the generation adequacy. So, the investment in conventional and renewable capacities should be done in a coordinated manner to meet both adequacy and environmental goals. Thus, the present study is conducted to present a regulatory tool for coordinated incentive design of investment in conventional and renewable generation capacities considering market equilibria. To this aim, a bi-level model is proposed where in the first level, regulator determines capacity-based and energy-based incentives paid for conventional and renewable generations, respectively, considering targets for adequacy and environmental issues. In the second level, the investment behavior of generation companies in response to investment incentives is anticipated using a game-theoretic model. Our results show that regulatory targets for adequacy and environmental issues are simultaneously realized by the proposed coordinated incentive design. Besides, cost of the designed incentives considerably reduces compared to the recent works.