MARGINAL SHARE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES OF VARIABLE ELECTRICITY GENERATION A Contribution to the Concept Definition

Technology development is a keystone within the efforts toward enabling longer duration of the world fossil energy resources. The past development and the technologies applied, cause huge emissions of CO2 that must be significantly reduced. Increased usage of renewable energy sources for electricity generation (RES-e) contributes essentially to the reduction of CO2, but on the other hand, under current conditions of feed-in priority reduces also the market for the electricity from fossil fuelled power plants. The other possibility for reduction of CO2 emissions is to apply carbon capture and storage technologies as a part of overall fossil fuelled power plants technologies. A hypothesis presented in this paper is that there is a marginal share of RES variable electricity in overall annual electricity supply after which further increase of RES-e participation produces higher average electricity generated cost, than in the case of CO2 emission reduction by applying carbon capture and storage technologies. The presented work confirms this hypothesis. Value of the marginal share depends to the price of RES-e feed-in. With the price span from 13.5 to 7.5 (sic)c/kWh, the marginal share is under 50%.