All over the world EPSs are faced with greenhouse gas emission reduction policies and the integration of electricity generated by renewables. According to the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (2017), the global renewable power capacity reached 2,017 GW at the end of 2016. Renewable energy sources are sustainable and very useful to reduce the dependency on crude oil but often they are very volatile and hard to predict.
In Germany, electricity generated by renewables had a share of 29% in 2016. Until 2025, the German government aims to have a 40-45% share of renewables in electricity generation. Hence, the German EPS is faced with tremendous challenges in the next years. For instance, the residual load, which is defined as the difference of electricity demand and the feed-in of renewables, will still decrease in the next years. A declining residual load means less service times for conventional generation units (e.g. lignite, hardcoal, or gas).
In order to understand the complexity of the EPS and to evaluate its future development under uncertain conditions, EPS analysis is an important task. In our interdisciplinary research project KOSiNeK (Combined Optimization, Simulation and Grid Analysis of the German EPS in an European Context) three groups of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-N¨urnberg (FAU) perform an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and holistic analysis of the German EPS. Within the subproject Simulation our group combines discrete event simulation and System Dynamics in one framework in order to model different components like renewables, electrical loads, thermal generation units, storage systems, and the control of the interaction of these components (Pruckner and German 2013; Pruckner 2016). Due to the expansion of the spatial and temporal resolution and the aim of modeling the electricity market in more details by using mathematical optimization for solving the unit commitment problem, the complexity of our simulation model is still increasing until the end of the research project KOSiNeK in 2019.
