The times they are a changin’: Current and future trends in electricity demand and supply

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Author(s)
Rai, A
Esplin, R
Nunn, O
Nelson, T
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2019
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The increasing penetration of variable renewable electricity generation in Australia's National Electricity Market over the past decade has led to a sustained change in the shape of electricity demand. In particular, intra-day demand has become more volatile, with demand in some Australian regions increasingly resembling the widely-cited ‘duck curve’ or more appropriately the ‘emu curve’. The changes in demand have, in turn, economically driven out generators whose technical characteristics are ill-suited to supplying this demand profile: high capacity-factor, slow-start plant. In this article, we describe the changes to ...
View more >The increasing penetration of variable renewable electricity generation in Australia's National Electricity Market over the past decade has led to a sustained change in the shape of electricity demand. In particular, intra-day demand has become more volatile, with demand in some Australian regions increasingly resembling the widely-cited ‘duck curve’ or more appropriately the ‘emu curve’. The changes in demand have, in turn, economically driven out generators whose technical characteristics are ill-suited to supplying this demand profile: high capacity-factor, slow-start plant. In this article, we describe the changes to date in the profile of electricity demand, and draw on other studies to argue that these trends are likely to accelerate going forward based on projected future uptake of variable renewables. In combination with technological and policy developments, these trends imply that flexible plant, such as peaking gas, hydro, and dispatchable storage, are likely to be better suited to the changing profile of demand, in contrast to slow-start and relatively inflexible technologies such as coal and combined-cycle gas plants. These trends are based on the flexibility of different generation technologies and their interaction with emissions considerations.
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View more >The increasing penetration of variable renewable electricity generation in Australia's National Electricity Market over the past decade has led to a sustained change in the shape of electricity demand. In particular, intra-day demand has become more volatile, with demand in some Australian regions increasingly resembling the widely-cited ‘duck curve’ or more appropriately the ‘emu curve’. The changes in demand have, in turn, economically driven out generators whose technical characteristics are ill-suited to supplying this demand profile: high capacity-factor, slow-start plant. In this article, we describe the changes to date in the profile of electricity demand, and draw on other studies to argue that these trends are likely to accelerate going forward based on projected future uptake of variable renewables. In combination with technological and policy developments, these trends imply that flexible plant, such as peaking gas, hydro, and dispatchable storage, are likely to be better suited to the changing profile of demand, in contrast to slow-start and relatively inflexible technologies such as coal and combined-cycle gas plants. These trends are based on the flexibility of different generation technologies and their interaction with emissions considerations.
View less >
Journal Title
Electricity Journal
Volume
32
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Applied economics
Policy and administration