With about 10 GW of offshore wind power expected to come on the system in the UK by 2020, balancing the additional intermittent capacity, mostly through gas-fired plants, will "not pose a major challenge," Dong Energy's UK country manager, Benji Sykes said in an evening debate in Westminster on 'Cutting the costs of Carbon'.
Plans to allow more natural gas exports from the US will become more difficult in two years once the proposed emissions restrictions on existing power plants come into effect, Juscelino Colares, law professor at Case Western Reserve University told Gas to Power Journal.
"Power plants are subject to regulations that are designed to turn them towards fewer emissions, and the way they are meeting them is by switching to [cleaner burning] natural gas," he said calling the process "a very dramatic transformation in the history of the US in the past 6-7 years."
Robert Bradley, CEO of The Institute for Energy Research (IER), has denounced the US President's Climate Action Plan for its subsidies for clean coal. "The new proposal would throw good money after bad," he said. "Not only is taxpayer money being wasted, businesses are being enticed into investments that are costing their shareholders dearly as real-world experience shows."
Diminishing price spreads between peak and off-peak load, and a flattening seasonal profile of price differentials have emerged in Germany as a consequence of the expansion of renewables, says Dr. Kathrin Thomaschki, Vice Chair of the Ruling Chamber 6, Access to Electricity Grid at the German Federal Energy Regulator (BNetzA).
Competition in Europe's energy sector is shrinking and investment has stalled amid growing regulatory intervention in the market, Olga Mikhailova, Advisor Market Units at Eurelectric warned at Gas to Power Journal's conference in Düsseldorf.
"The European energy sector is unable to invest, as credit rating of utilities is deteriorating and most generation assets are valued at close to zero by financial investors," she said, suggesting regulatory risk has become the main cause of concern, overtaking market risk.
The political tide in Berlin is turning in favour for a strategic reserve, ideally implemented on a regional level, though there is no sense of urgency as reserve margins are healthy until 2018/19, Franzjosef Schafhausen, Head of Department for Energy at the German Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) said in a keynote speech at Gas to Power Journal's conference in Düsseldorf. "What we need is an evolution, not a revolution towards a capacity mechanism."
Capacity auctions in the UK are due to be launched in 2014 to bring forward investment for new projects that will start operations in 2018 or 2019. However, this is "not fast enough" to avert the risk of blackouts amid tightening reserve margins, Keith Anderson, chief corporate officer at Scottish Power warned.
The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has today announced plans to exploit newfound shale gas reserves, but this may not mean cheap power. “Shale gas’s impact on price will be much less than what we have seen in the US. The roll-out is likely to be a bit slower [than in the US] due to community resistance against fracking,” Tim Yeo, Chairman of the UK Energy and Climate Select Committee said at a conference in London.
First auctions under the UK's capacity market will take place - subject to State Aid approval - in 2014, for the delivery of flexible electricity capacity from the winter of 2018-19, the government said today. The Capacity Market, along with long-term Contract for Differences (CfDs) is meant to spur infrastructure investment of up to 100 billion pounds.