Switching between fuels: lessons from four countries using decomposition analysis

Agathe de La Selle

As the climate crisis and energy supply concerns are intensifying, countries are looking for ways to switch between energy sources. While different countries have tried to phase-out or introduce fuels in the past, the drivers and context favouring fuel switching are not always understood. Therefore, studying past successes and failures can bring valuable knowledge. This thesis uses decomposition analysis to study how consumption of different fuels have evolved in four countries, attributing the changes to three drivers: efficiency, activity, and fuel switching. It compares the attempts to reduce coal use in the UK and Germany, and the introduction of nuclear power in France and Japan.

Supervisors:

• Dr Jamie Speirs, Sustainable Gas Institute
• Dr Peter Zeniewski, International Energy Agency

 

How will the increasing penetration of renewable energy affect long-term volatility in the UK?

Hana Douglas

The world has been experiencing cyclical energy crises over the past half-century, the most recent being the post-pandemic global energy shortage. Energy stakeholders are looking to mitigate the devastating economic effects of this, whilst considering the Net Zero commitments made for decarbonising the power sector. This project offers a diagnosis of the current crisis within the energy transition framework, through market forecasting with a focus on long-term volatility. A statistical time series simulation is performed utilising regression models and Monte Carlo methods.

Supervisors:

• Dr. Salvador Acha, Research Fellow, Department of Chemical Engineering, ICL
• Mr. Max Bird, Research Postgraduate, Department of Chemical Engineering, ICL
• Mr. Ruslan Galimov, Global Pricing Leader (Offshore Wind), General Electric

 

Future of energy merchant markets in renewable energy: The case of Germany

Carlos Eduardo Vallejo Betancur

In 2021, wholesale prices in the European Union (EU) rose to unusual levels. This situation can be described as a ‘perfect storm’ of causes that coincided during this period. This highlights the interlinkages and dependency of factors that determine the market signals for the EU.

This research project is focused on the German electricity market, considering the current geopolitical situation, and aims to investigate the key factors that contribute to the formation of the wholesale price, as well as study their correlations and impact, analyse the implications of the current situation and propose strategies to facilitate the energy transition.

Supervisors:

• Mr Ruslan Galimov, Global Pricing Leader (Offshore Wind), General Electric
• Professor Adam Hawkes, Department of Chemical Engineering

 

How do the operating patterns of power stations change in response to changing fuel and carbon prices and the growing share of renewable output?

Alejandro Marzano Adame

This project was written to aid in the understanding of half-hourly behavioural capacity generation patterns at power plants in the United Kingdom. This will be used to investigate the load curves and future shape of the British power market. Volatile prices and its consequences have made necessary the study of changes in output and demand of different technologies. Investigates the United Kingdom’s energy transition by gathering evidence from the literature of known behaviour patterns of similar power stations, with the capacity factor as the key metric, and analysing the relation between them.

Supervisor:

• Professor Richard Green, Business School

 

UK natural gas price decomposition: fundamentals and financial infuences

Luc Ruffie

Natural gas plays a vital role in the UK's energy mix. However, as European reserves dwindle and geopolitical relations turn into economic wars, gas has been at the centre of a market rally, bringing consumers and gas-dependent industry to their knees. In addition to market fundamentals, there are also reasons to believe that other financial assets are influencing its price. Therefore, this project aims to highlight the reasons of past price changes and future price scenarios thanks to a structural vector autoregressive model (SVAR). This model will provide insight on what drives the market, to help market participants manage their exposure and to advise policymakers.

Supervisor:

• Dr Jamie Speirs, Sustainable Gas Institute

 

Applications of blockchain and P2P transactive energy market for achieving net zero emissions

Ara Sriskandarajah

Global electric vehicle uptake is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29% until 2030. To support this surge in demand for electricity and net zero transition, the grid needs to evolve to alleviate potential network strain. Transactive energy promotes demand side reaction driven by economic incentives to operate systems reliably to prevent the current scenario of peak loads to double by 2030. To facilitate this approach, blockchain is considered as a form of smart contracts for transactions and ensuring the security and privacy of data. To analyse the impact on carbon emissions, UK's electricity demand data will be used to run a transactive energy model via Matlab.

Supervisors:

• Dr Fei Teng, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Dr Mingyu Yan, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

 

Blockchain as a Solution for Transactive Energy Markets

William Zard

Home energy storage systems are forecast to grow at least 30 times from 2016 to 2025. The traditional retail market seems outdated and new market systems must be established to effectively incentivise customers to use their Decentralised Energy Resources (DERs).  The popular current solution is Feed-in-Tariff, which fails to maximise the bidirectional space for energy flow. Peer-to-peer transactive energy markets have emerged as a new market paradigm, allowing consumers to trade energy. This project aims to demonstrate the usefulness of blockchain as a private, secure, transparent, energy-efficient, and scalable solution in this context.

Supervisors:

• Dr. Fei Teng, Electrical Engineering
• Dr. Mingyu Yan, Electrical Engineering