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The drivers of power system emissions: an econometric analysis of load, wind and forecast errors

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Abstract

This research models the drivers of emissions historically to identify the factors most effective in reducing power system emissions. It estimates the average effects of wind and load on \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emissions from the Republic of Ireland’s electricity market. The findings suggest that wind generation and load reduction are not equally effective on average in terms of reducing emissions and that a 1 MW increase in wind is approximately 65% on average as effective at reducing emissions as a 1 MW load reduction, a result in line with existing literature. However, the results also show that a reduction in load and an increase in wind have a similar impact on emissions if wind forecast errors are explicitly modelled. Thus, the emissions reduction differentiation may not only be driven by the timing of load and wind output, the wind forecast error also has an important role. Positive and negative wind forecast errors are found to have opposite effects on emissions.

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Notes

  1. One of the benefits of DSM is demand smoothing, whereby demand from peak hours is reduced and shifted to periods of lower demand, however we focus on an absolute reduction in demand in this study.

  2. Baseload plants are used to meet a system’s minimum continuous energy demand.

  3. The authors also considered quadratic specifications of the models but these were found to reduce the predictive power of the models with coefficients of zero on the quadratic variables and thus the results of these models are not displayed here.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of the Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), London, UK

    Amy O’Mahoney

  2. Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Eleanor Denny

  3. Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, and E2SHI, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Benjamin F. Hobbs

  4. School of Electrical, Electronic, and Communications Engineering, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Mark O’Malley

Authors
  1. Amy O’Mahoney
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  2. Eleanor Denny
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  3. Benjamin F. Hobbs
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  4. Mark O’Malley
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eleanor Denny.

Additional information

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Ofgem or the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority. This work was conducted in part while Amy O’Mahoney was at Trinity College Dublin, and visiting Johns Hopkins, and was funded by Teagasc under the Walsh Fellowship Programme and the Electricity Research Centre (ERC). Ben Hobbs was supported by NSF Grants IIA 1243482 and ECCS 1230788. This work was conducted in part while Eleanor Denny was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 40215, USA.

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O’Mahoney, A., Denny, E., Hobbs, B.F. et al. The drivers of power system emissions: an econometric analysis of load, wind and forecast errors. Energy Syst 9, 853–872 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12667-017-0253-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12667-017-0253-9

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