Once our model was in place, we decided to see how changing fuel prices affected the use of the
different plants due to high price variability and KCPL's future plans to increase the amount of electricity it generates from natural gas. This led to three
scenarios:
The resulting energy profiles in the three scenarios can be seen below:
- Simulation with fuel prices similar to the fuel prices in 2014 (when
natural gas prices hit significant spikes)
- Simulation with fuel prices similar to today's fuel prices
- Simulation with fuel prices similar to today’s fuel prices and lower variable O&M costs for the larger natural gas plants (since we do not know the actual numbers for KCPL’s plants).
The resulting energy profiles in the three scenarios can be seen below:
We can clearly see that natural gas use in Scenario 3 is much higher than in the previous scenarios. There is a clear “green cap” of natural gas during the peak hours for each of the days. In this Scenario 59,000 MWh were produced by natural gas compared to 17,600 MWh and 3,500 MWh in Scenarios 2 and 3 respectively. Scenario 3 is close to what happens in reality: coal and nuclear plants provide the majority of the base load while natural gas plants are the peaking plants that turn on during times of high demand. This can also be illustrated by looking at how often natural gas plants are being run during times of peak demand:
In the plot below, we can also see that the model’s output solution for each of the scenarios closely follows the actual demand. In fact, in Scenario 1 the biggest difference between the output and demand is only 212 MWh, occurring at 5:30am on Wednesday. The demand drops off for only a short time, and the model found that it was best to overshoot the demand for the time to avoid additional startup costs. In reality this could be a problem if too much electricity is released. In Scenarios 2 and 3 the our model overshoots demand at most by 185 MWh, illustrating that the reduced price of natural gas favors turning on peaking plants rather than running a coal plant longer.