Energy and ancillary services value of CSP with thermal energy storage in the Australian national electricity market

Abstract

The dispatchability of concentrated solar power (CSP) with thermal energy storage (TES) offers the ability to provide ancillary services (AS) such as spinning reserve and frequency regulation. In this paper, the energy and ancillary services value of CSP-TES in the Australian national electricity market (NEM) is estimated using production cost simulation (PCS) of the NEM system by the PLEXOS software. This study also compares the energy benefits of a CSP plant with TES estimated from the PCS of the NEM using a generator short run marginal cost (SRMC) based stack model and that obtained from the PCS using a generator bids based stack model. The latter model is more realistic as it uses actual generator bids data in the market and our results show that the energy benefits of a CSP with TES in the NEM estimated from the latter model is significantly higher than that estimated from the former model.