Cost Performance Tradeoff Study of Low-Carbon System Concepts

Achieving higher emission reductions on one hand and employing lower cost concepts on the other hand are desirable in designing future power generator systems. Hence, interdisciplinary studies in a form of system concept modeling should be employed to conceptualize and construct economic and efficient low-carbon system concepts. The concept modeling starts with simple idealized models that preserve the key structural features of a system and adds complex features in the following stages to elucidate principles, relationships, and interfaces. For wind systems, the essential features for concept modeling are wind and load variations, and the main goal is to obtain the cost of electricity delivered by the system as a function of wind penetration (emission reduction); more complex features (storage, photovoltaic, transmission, etc.) are added in the following stages. In this work, an interdisciplinary concept modeling is provided to estimate the magnitude of cost versus performance using the wind/load data from Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland Interconnection (RIM) LLC, and cost estimations published by the Energy Information Agency. The results show that system total cost increases modestly at low penetration, and it increases more rapidly when wind curtailment becomes significant. Eventually storage becomes cheaper than curtailment. The key question that should be answered in this modeling is the magnitude of electricity cost for high penetration, low emission systems.