Webinar: Renewable Energy and Market Design Challenges

Featured Speaker: Jonathan O’Sullivan has spent over 20 years working in the electricity industry in the planning, operation and markets design. In this time he has developed an acknowledged expertise in the theoretical modelling of the system, the necessary practical operation practices and the requirements for a well designed and functional market. In recent years Jonathan has been central to the implementation of the first electricity market in Ireland in 2000, the first all island market in 2007, the development of the “Delivering a Secure sustainable power system” (DS3) programme which will deliver the secure and reliable operation of the Ireland and Northern Ireland power system with unprecedented levels of wind electricity by 2020. His current role in EirGrid, the transmission system operator in Ireland and Northern Ireland, is Manager Innovation. Through this Jonathan drives general innovation in the group as well as specific technology strategies which include DS3, distributed power flow control devices, solar and storage. To do this Jonathan’s team need to consider the future needs of the power system and envisage how these multiple technology strategies may interact at scale. These considerations require technical, economic and government policy considerations.

Moderator: UVIG Executive Director, Charlie Smith

Registration Cost: Free

Additional Information: Market design challenges are an issue everywhere with the advent of cheap gas and large volumes of zero marginal cost renewable energy. This webinar will address the issues which can arise in the design and operation of electricity markets with a large share of wind and solar power generation, which are common to both North America and Europe. When electricity markets were designed in the 1990’s, the large volumes of zero marginal cost energy from renewable power plants and negative prices were never anticipated. The issues of capacity adequacy and capacity flexibility are now front and center everywhere.

The Irish electricity system has a 7,000 MW peak load, and plans to be meeting 40% of its annual energy requirement with wind and solar energy by 2020. It is expecting to see instantaneous wind penetrations approaching 75% by 2020. As a consequence, it is dealing with many of these market design and system operations issues before anyone else. It is difficult for a generator to capture sufficient revenues to stay in business in an energy market with depressed prices for many hours of operation; not only capacity, but flexible capacity, must be incentivized in the future; a new range of ancillary services essential for maintaining system reliability must be identified and incentivized, such as inertial response and fast frequency response. These and related issues are relevant in both Europe and North America, and will be discussed from the Irish electricity market point of view.

Attendees will be able to ask questions following the presentation.

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