This paper examines peat power production in Ireland under the three pillars of energy policy--security, competitiveness and environment. Peat contributes to energy security--as an indigenous fuel, it reduces dependency on imports. During a period of low capacity margins, the operation of the...

In order to reach a goal of universal access to modern energy services in Africa by 2030, consideration of various electricity sector pathways is required to help inform policy-makers and investors, and help guide power system design. To that end, and building on existing tools and analysis, we...

Ireland imports 88% of its energy requirements. Oil makes up 59% of total final energy consumption (TFC). Import dependency, low fuel diversity and volatile prices leave Ireland vulnerable in terms of energy security. This work models energy security scenarios for Ireland using long term...

Efforts to meet climate change mitigation and energy security targets spur investments in variable renewable energy sources. Their implications for the operation of power plants are frequently investigated drawing on unit commitment and dispatch models. However, the temporal granularity and...

Ireland's Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (REFIT) for wind generation has some unusual features making it different from other REFIT schemes around the world. By utilising an annual floor price element the scheme presents an option value to the contract holder, which to date has gone unnoticed...

We employ Monte Carlo analysis to determine the distribution of returns for various electricity generation technologies. Costs and revenues for each technology are arrived by means of a sophisticated unit commitment and economic dispatch algorithm. The results show that small amounts of coal...

The stochastic nature of wind alters the unit commitment and dispatch problem. By accounting for this uncertainty when scheduling the system, more robust schedules are produced, which should, on average, reduce expected costs. In this paper, the effects of stochastic wind and load on the unit...

This paper compares retail and wholesale electricity prices in SEM, the market of the island of Ireland, and BETTA in Great Britain. Wholesale costs are much lower in BETTA. We show that this is mostly because the wholesale price in BETTA is set too low to cover generation costs, although it is...

In this paper we analyse the 2008 electricity price in the Irish All-Island Market. We test whether this price is 'efficient' by comparing it to the electricity price in Great Britain. This analysis suggests that around ?16 per MWh of the difference in wholesale prices between Ireland and...