Abstracts Education

The impact of electricity system characteristics on the role and value of power generation technology in the system transitions

by Yoga Wienda Pratama

System decarbonisation has been a focus in the development of energy systems in the 21st century and the decarbonisation of electricity systems is understood to be critical to enabling the whole system decarbonisation. Accordingly, the future electricity system is anticipated to exhibit distinct characteristics compared to the current system. However, preoccupation with images of the 20st century system persists, leading to a disparity between the climate mitigation goals, policy decisions, future system requirements, technology innovations focus, and market mechanisms. This thesis attempted to address this challenge by investigating the role and value of power generation technology, particularly CCS-equipped power plants, in delivering net-zero emissions targets under different policy and market paradigms in systems with different characteristics. Here, we show that policy mechanisms and technology innovations that overlook the systems’ integration cannot decarbonise the systems while potentially inflating the cost. Despite the necessity to minimise the system’s residual emissions, the carbon tax needs to be paired with CO2 removal (CDR) credit to deep decarbonise the system. These mechanisms can accelerate variable renewable energy (VRE) deployment that is benefited the most from further technology cost reduction. Although CCS continues to be seen as a pre-commercial technology, we found that the incumbent technology is already cost-effective to provide substantial value to the systems and that further cost reduction of CCS will not considerably reduce system cost. Thus, public spending should focus on efforts to enable the commercial deployment of CCS, such as CO2 transport and storage infrastructure deployment. Moreover, the implementation of CDR trading to complement existing wholesale electricity, capacity, and emissions markets can considerably reduce electricity prices. While these system-level findings appear to be relevant in all cases, we found that system characteristics strongly affect directions for future technology improvements in the technology level. Interestingly, in systems with rapidly growing demand, accelerating the deployment of low carbon dispatchable technology is more appreciated than technology improvements.