Future security of power supply in Germany-The role of stochastic power plant outages and intermittent generation

Abstract

Many power plants in Germany and Europe are approaching the end of their technical lifetime. Moreover, the increasing wind and solar power generation reduces the operation times of thermal power plants, making future investments in new generation capacity uncertain under current market conditions. Consequently, the future development of security of power supply is unclear. In this paper, we assess the impact of stochastic fluctuations in power plant availability, renewable generation, and grid load on the future security of supply in Germany. We model variations in power plant availability by application of a combined Mean-reversion Jump-diffusion approach. On the basis of that and using Monte-Carlo methods, we simulate 300 different time series of availability. These profiles are fed into the fundamental power system model REMix, applied to evaluate the appearance of supply shortfalls in hourly resolution. We assess 6 scenarios for the year 2025, differing in renewable generation and demand profiles, as well as grid infrastructure. Geographical focus of the analysis is Germany, but the electricity exchange with its European neighbours is modelled as well. Our results show that the choice of the power plant availability profile can change the loss of load expectation and loss of load hours by up to 50%. However, the influence of load and renewable generation profiles is found to be significantly higher. Assuming that no new conventional power plants are built and existing plants are decommissioned at the end of their empirical lifetime, we identify supply gaps of up to 2.7 GW in Germany.