Impact of a significant share of renewable energies on the European power generation system

Due to the climate objectives by the European Union a structural change of the power generation in Europe can be expected in future. Especially the share of renewable energies, such as wind and solar power, will increase rapidly in the years to come. As a result, the unit commitment of the residual power generation pool, e.g. thermal and hydro power plants, will be influenced by the volatile feed-in of renewable energies depending on the installed capacity. In addition, further consequences concerning an increase of reserve capacity can be expected. Thus, there is a motivation to investigate the impact of a significant share of renewable energies on the European power generation system. Using market simulation methods supply and demand for electrical energy can be simulated under consideration of technical constraints of power generation and transmission for a defined system. In view of these circumstances this paper presents a market simulation method and resulting future scenarios of the power generation system in detail. The approach focuses on the evaluation of the structure as well as economics, i.e. the impact on the generation pool and its marginal generation cost for electrical energy and the transnational interdependencies, in case of a significant share of renewable energies in the power generation system.