The Oxford Martin Programme
on Integrating Renewable Energy
Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of eight experts on energy
issues from five Oxford University departments, the programme
aims to deliver a framework for understanding technical, market
and policy requirements for integrating renewables across a wide
range of scales, resource types and contexts.
Electricity supply and demand must remain
balanced across the whole grid at all times, which
makes accommodating increasing amounts
of variable wind and solar power challenging.
Current approaches to managing this are far from
optimal. At times when supply exceeds demand,
wind and solar power are being “curtailed”,
whilst other generation is still needed when
demand exceeds solar and wind supply, so that
much capacity of both types is used inefficiently.
Zero marginal cost wind and solar power also
tend to depress prices in wholesale electricity
markets, which undermines the business model
of conventional utilities in countries with a lot
of renewables, leading to concerns about the
adequacy of investment and energy security.
Dealing more effectively with the
intermittency of renewable sources will require
some combination of energy storage, more grid
inter-connection and demand response, as well
as flexible generation. There is no
agreement on what mixture of these
measures will minimize the over-all
‘system cost’. The answer is likely to
differ from place to place and with the
time of year, and will change as the
contribution of renewables grows. So
far relatively little attention has been
paid to the need to re-think regulatory,
market and institutional arrangements
in order to provide the incentives
for development and deployment of
acceptable combinations of these
changes.
renewableenergy.ox.ac.uk
The Oxford Martin Programme on
Integrating Renewable Energy brings together
a team of experts on energy issues from five
Oxford University departments to conduct
interdisciplinary research on the technical,
market, social, and policy challenges for
integrating renewables across a wide range of
scales, resource types and contexts.
Energy can be stored in a variety of
ways, including electromagnetic, mechanical,
electrochemical,
thermal
and
chemical
mechanisms. Today pumped hydro dominates
in power systems, but increasing the role of
intermittent renewable generation brings
challenges that require much greater levels
of storage and different combinations. We
are exploring the potential opportunities and
applications on timescales from sub-second
to seasonal, based on the characteristics of
different storage technologies.
Although technological progress continues
to drive down costs and increase performance,
this is not occurring sufficiently fast in all
fields. We are therefore investigating drivers
of cost reduction in low carbon technologies,
instruments that can accelerate technology
development, and the impacts of innovation
policy on enabling low carbon energy systems
with sufficient capacity and flexibility.
Increasingly renewable and distributed
electricity systems are also challenging existing
market structures, and therefore our research is
considering the market arrangements needed to
incentivise effective investment and operation
of low-carbon generation. This will focus on
power market arrangements, nodal and time
based pricing, and industrial organization and
competition. It will includes how consumers and
the demand-side may play a more active role
in supporting system needs, identifying and
modelling options for technology, operations
and service expectation changes.
Larger roles for decentralised actors, on
the one hand, and international interconnection,
on the other, are already challenging the idea
of nationally determined governance. Storage
fits poorly into regulatory structures designed
around clearly separated domains of monopoly
networks and competitive generation and
supply. And greater roles for demand side actors
are not consistent with the passive consumer
assumption implicit in traditional power sector
governance. Our research will address how
these profound technical and market changes
will affect and be affected by the framework of
policy, governance and institutions.
Through this work we are developing the
conceptual tools needed to understand systems
with high levels of renewable electricity in
different scenarios. We are applying these to
aligned case study projects, including on: supply
side balancing of solar and hydro in Kenya;
the development of a peer-to-peer trading
platform; electricity retail market reform in the
UK; and distributed storage heating in the EU.
The programme is supported by the
Oxford Martin School, and receives input
from key partners in industry and government
which is helping to ensure that it delivers early
results that are relevant to industry, commercial
interests and the formulation of policy.
Energy
oxford
For more information contact
[email protected]
[email protected]
or visit renewableenergy.ox.ac.uk