Due to the fluctuating character of the renewable energy sources the demand of conventional power plants for flexibility is increasing. In the recent years, in Germany there has been a fast rise of production capacity of renewable energies, especially from wind turbines, photovoltaic installations, and biomass plants. The installed nominal power of wind turbines is actually (December 2016) 42 GW and of photovoltaic installations 40?GW. The renewable electric energy production in Germany is about 190?TWh/a, which represents a share of 33% of the yearly demand. The increased need for flexibility affects both the power gradients as well as the minimum load of conventional power plants. Due to this flexibility behaviour, conventional power plants are faced with problems concerning the durability of power plant components, corrosion, more maintenance effort and consequently the overall life expectancy. Another consequence of the increasing share of renewable energies is the decreasing full load operating hours, especially of coal fired and gas power plants. Along with decreasing revenues from the energy exchange market, coal fired power plants are faced with new economically challenges.

This paper gives a short overview of the German Energiewende, i.e. the transition of a large and mostly thermal electricity system towards electricity generation from renewable energy source. It discusses both, the motivation of the transitions as future goals and current status. Furthermore, it gives an in-depth view into the changes in economic costs for society as well as electricity price effects, especially for average private households and industrial consumers. It also discusses the benefits of the promotion of renewable energies in Germany.

Germany’s energy transition triggered a rapid and unilateral growth of renewable energy sources (RES) in the electricity sector. With increasing shares of intermittent RES, overcapacities during periods of strong wind and photovoltaic electricity generation occur. In the face of insufficient transmission capacities, due to an inhibited network extension, the electricity generation has to be curtailed. This curtailment of RES leads to economic losses and could be avoided through flexible loads. As an option to cope with those problems, the technologies of power-to-gas (PtG) and power-to-heat (PtH) are presented in this paper. First, the alkaline electrolyzer (AEL), polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzer (PEMEL), and solid oxide electrolyzer cell (SOEC) are investigated regarding their operational parameters. Second, the electric boiler, electrode heating boiler, and heat pumps are considered. Ultimately, the network-supporting abilities and the potential to provide ancillary services, such as control power, load sequence operation, cold start and part load capability, are compared among one another.

The sectoral coupling of road traffic (in form of E-Mobility) and electrical energy supply (known as power-to-vehicle (P2V), vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is discussed as one of the possible development concepts for the flexible system integration of renewable energy sources (RES) and the support of the objectives of the German energy transition (aka. Energiewende). It is obvious that E-mobility, which shall produce as few emissions as possible, should be based on the exclusive use of renewable energies. At the same time, the E-mobility can help to reduce the negative effects of the grid integration of RES to the distribution grids. However, this assumes that the electric vehicles are smart integrated to the grids where they charge, meaning that they must be able to communicate and be controllable. Because per se unplanned and uncontrollable charging processes are harmful for the grid operation, especially if they occur frequently and unexpected in similar time periods, the effects can hardly be controlled and can lead to serious technical problems in practical grid operation. This paper provides an insight into the current development of E-mobility in Germany. The insight will be matched with the German development of the RES. By the combination of both sectors, the possible role of the E-mobility for the distribution grid will be depicted, which can have positive and negative aspects.

This paper presents the selected power quality (PQ) indicia of a wind generator and a photovoltaic installation considered to be the representative of medium voltage and low voltage distribution grids. The analysis of measured values suggests that the decrease in PQ is a case of specific combination of distributed generation, grid parameters and load behaviour. Modern generators have a limited impact on PQ. On the other hand, fluctuations in power generation are regarded as an emerging PQ indicator. The growing number of distributed renewable installations causes stochastic, variable, and hardly predictable power flows in the distribution grid. The nature of fluctuations in wind and solar generation is different. In both cases, new indexes for the quantification of fluctuations are needed and are yet not standardised. Proper assessment of these fluctuations enables definition of useful fluctuation limits and rules for optimal storage system integration.

In Poland more than 40% of the power units have been operating for over 40 years now and more than 10% are over 50 years old, which indicates a high degree of decrease in the value of the energy sector. An analysis of the energy market shows that every year a new power plant should be built with a capacity of 1000 MW to ensure the national energy security. An energy market research indicates that in Poland the structure of energy production is changing in recent years—the share of fossil (solid) fuels in electricity and heat production was approximately 88% in 2009, while in 2004 it reached 93%. According to the analysis of the market, it can be seen that conventional energy, mainly based on coal and lignite, has been the most important segment of the sector for a long time.?In this paper the prospects for the development of power technologies based on renewable energy sources (RES) in Poland are presented.

Unlike the traditional fossil energy, wind, as the clean renewable energy, can reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas. To take full advantage of the environmental benefits of wind energy, wind power forecasting has to be studied to overcome the troubles brought by the variable nature of wind. Power forecasting for regional wind farm groups is the problem that many power system operators care about. The high-dimensional feature sets with redundant information are frequently encountered when dealing with this problem. In this paper, two kinds of feature set construction methods are proposed which can achieve the proper feature set either by selecting the subsets or by transforming the original variables with specific combinations. The former method selects the subset according to the criterion of minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance (mRMR), while the latter does so based on the method of principal component analysis (PCA). A locally weighted learning method is also proposed to utilize the processed feature set to produce the power forecast results. The proposed model is simple and easy to use with parameters optimized automatically. Finally, a case study of 28 wind farms in East China is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper applies a cumulant-based analytical method for probabilistic load flow (PLF) assessment in transmission and distribution systems. The uncertainties pertaining to photovoltaic generations and aggregate bus load powers are probabilistically modeled in the case of transmission systems. In the case of distribution systems, the uncertainties pertaining to plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and battery electric vehicle charging demands in residential community as well as charging stations are probabilistically modeled. The probability distributions of the result variables (bus voltages and branch power flows) pertaining to these inputs are accurately established. The multiple input correlation cases are incorporated. Simultaneously, the performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on a modified Ward-Hale 6-bus system and an IEEE 14-bus transmission system as well as on a modified IEEE 69-bus radial and an IEEE 33-bus mesh distribution system. The results of the proposed method are compared with that of Monte-Carlo simulation.

This paper presents various approaches used by researchers for handling the uncertainties involved in renewable energy sources, load demands, etc. It gives an idea about stochastic programming (SP) and discusses the formulations given by different researchers for objective functions such as cost, loss, generation expansion, and voltage/V control with various conventional and advanced methods. Besides, it gives a brief idea about SP and its applications and discusses different variants of SP such as recourse model, chance constrained programming, sample average approximation, and risk aversion. Moreover, it includes the application of these variants in various power systems. Furthermore, it also includes the general mathematical form of expression for these variants and discusses the mathematical description of the problem and modeling of the system. This review of different optimization techniques will be helpful for smart grid development including renewable energy resources (RERs).

In this paper, the main contributions to congestion management and electricity pricing, i.e., nodal, zonal, and uniform electricity pricing, are surveyed. The key electricity market concepts are structured and a formal model framework is proposed for electricity transportation, production, and consumption in the context of limited transmission networks and competitive, welfare maximizing electricity markets. In addition, the main results of existing short-run and long-run congestion management studies are explicitly summarized. In particular, the important interconnection between short-run network management approaches and optimal long-run investments in both generation facilities and network lines are highlighted.