Electricity Generation and Operational Planning

In this chapter, an overview of the major technologies for power production is given. For fossil and biomass plants, steam and gas turbines along with the cor-responding Rankine and Joule cycles are introduced. Also combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs), motor engines and fuel cells are covered as well as combined heat and power (CHP) generation as a technology with high energy efficiency. The section on nuclear energy illustrates the basic physical processes and the technical concepts like the pressurized water reactor as well as the accompanying risks and environmental effects. Among the multiple renewable energy technologies, the focus is on hydro, wind, solar and bioenergy as these are predominantly used across the world. Again the physical and technological basics are covered, including e.g. in the case of wind power the relationship between wind speed and power as well as Betz’s law. The key technical and economic characteristics of the different generation tech-nologies are summarized in a separate section, introducing inter alia the concept of levelized cost of electricity. As the operation of an electricity system requires the combination of different technologies, the chapter concludes by introducing the scheduling problem for electricity generation – starting with the simple sup-ply stack or merit-order model. But also the mathematical formulation as an op-timization problem is covered.