System Friendliness Reduces Infrastructure Costs in the Electricity System - How can System-Friendly Behaviour be Incentivised?

Kurzfassung

We refer to "system friendliness" as the behaviour of decentralized actors, which helps decreasing the burden on the energy system. The system’s burden itself is the theoretical amount of infrastructure in terms of storage and grid capacities which is needed to ensure security of supply. System friendly behaviour will get more and more important particularly in sustainable energy systems. This is due to the phase out of big synchronizing and controllable power plants based on fossil fuels and a shift of the synchronization task to the system and demand levels. Decentral players in energy systems are often incentivized to behave in a certain way by financial mechanisms. However, today most of the existing respective structures incentivize self-sufficiency maximization or a constant load curve, which already has been proven suboptimal in most renewable energy systems. It is uncertain how to design incentives aiming for system friendly behaviour. This is why we examine over 6000 possible weightings of incentive mechanisms for decentral prosumers and gauge their impact on system friendliness indicators. Doing that, we demonstrate that there is a trade-off between storage and grid capacities in sustainable energy systems. This requires price signals to consider both global energy balance and local grid usage with respective weightings. We perform our optimization in a solar and a wind dominated region and show that there are robust Pareto-optimal solutions of incentives despite there being regional differences.