Price Formation in Zero-Carbon Electricity Markets: The Role of Hydropower

Technical Report · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 UTC 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1877029· OSTI ID:1877029

Zhou, Zhi ^[1]; Botterud, Audun ^[1]; Levin, Todd ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)

In April 2019, Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) launched the HydroWIRES Initiative to understand, enable, and improve hydropower and pumped storage hydropower’s (PSH’s) contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in the rapidly evolving U.S. electricity system. The unique characteristics of hydropower, including PSH, make it well suited to provide a range of storage, generation flexibility, and other grid services to support the cost-effective integration of variable renewable resources. The U.S. electricity system is rapidly evolving, bringing both opportunities and challenges for the hydropower sector. While increasing deployment of variable renewables such as wind and solar have enabled low-cost, clean energy in many U.S. regions, it has also created a need for resources that can store energy or quickly change their operations to ensure a reliable and resilient grid. Hydropower (including PSH) is not only a supplier of bulk, low-cost, renewable energy but also a source of large-scale flexibility and a force multiplier for other renewable power generation sources. Realizing this potential requires innovation in several areas: understanding value drivers for hydropower under evolving system conditions, describing flexible capabilities and associated tradeoffs associated with hydropower meeting system needs, optimizing hydropower operations and planning, and developing innovative technologies that enable hydropower to operate more flexibly.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Water Power Technologies Office
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 1877029
• Report Number(s): ANL-22/31; 176317
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

13 HYDRO ENERGY
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY