High penetration renewable energy requires power reform in China
To integrate more renewable energy sources in the Chinese electricity sector, power reforms are necessary, especially regulating the inflexible coal industry and making more fair conditions for renewable energy sources such as wind energy.
This is the main conclusion of 4DH PhD Fellow Weiming Xiong’s PhD dissertation from September 2016. Based on the REPO model, the study assessed the impact of flexible heating, gas peaking and storage, ultra-voltage transmission and power reform on long-term renewable energy development, and evaluated the pathway of China’s power sector with various qualified scenarios.
“Our results indicate that it is important to make a clear and fair electricity market for renewable energy to support long-term development of renewable energy. The power market reform would promote the replacement from coal power to renewable generation significantly,” said Weiming Xiong.
The results were published in Energy, Applied Energy, Nature Energy and reported by Washington Post and Chinese national news.
Weiming Xiong joined the 4DH Research Centre in 2012 as a PhD fellow at The Institute of Energy, Environment, and Economy at Tsinghua University under the supervision of Professor Xiliang Zhang. The focus of his research has been on the role of district heating in the Chinese energy system.
“In Northeast China, heat storage and heat pumps can make great contributions to decreasing surplus wind power during night hours. More flexible dispatch rules and integration between the electricity and heating sectors are believed as a mature technical solution to increase wind integration in Northeast China,” said Weiming Xiong.
During his PhD studies, he developed the “Renewable Electricity Planning and Operation (REPO) Model” to evaluate the long-term energy planning of China’s electricity sector. The REPO model is a bottom-up rolling-horizon mixed integer linear-programming long-term optimization model for generation and transmission on both power and combine heat and power sectors.
The precise spatial and temporal representation of renewable energy in the model provides a platform to evaluate the impact of technical and mechanism reform on the renewable electricity development and the transition of the power sector. In the model, the administrative dispatch and market policy in China’s power market are analyzed with specific modules.
Articles in Energy: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544216303371
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214014066
