A simulation based decision aid tool for setting regulation of energy grids with distributed generation

Abstract

Energy policies in the European Union (EU) and its 27 member states respond to three main concerns namely energy security, economic development, and environmental sustainability. All the three “Es” are pursued simultaneously with some slight differences in emphasizing the mutual importance of these, in particular the cost factors. The legislation of the EU (e.g., ETS—Emission Trading Scheme, directives) increasingly guides the member states’ energy policies. However, energy policy directions are still made domestically, for example, on the support on renewable energy technologies. In this work, we look into distributed generation (DG), since it has been grown considerable in the past few years and can be used to partially fulfill renewable energy targets. The policy makers have to make decisions about regulation directives, more specifically they have to change the current regulation in order to incentive the increase in DG. However, these decisions have not only economic impacts but also technical impacts that must be accounted for. In this regard, a decision aid tool would help the policy makers in estimating producer economic impacts, as well as power network technical impacts, of various possible regulation directives. Here, we propose an interactive decision aid tool that models the aforementioned impacts and thus, can be used by policy makers to experiment with different regulation directives before deciding on the ones to set.