New paper on balancing of high variable renewable shares

A new peer-reviewed paper  has been published full open access in Energies, MDPI, by Gardumi et al., investigating the costs and benefits of flexible generation options to balance high shares of variable renewables. The paper proposes add-ons for the OSeMOSYS code which allow the user to compute costs of ramping, non-linear decrease of the efficiency at partial load operation (with linear formulation) and refurbishment options for existing power plants. It then applies them to a simple test case study presenting features of the Italian energy system. The study builds on work initiated by Welsch et al. (2015) , which introduced the representation of demand and supply of reserve capacity in OSeMOSYS. It was performed within a doctoral thesis work  proposing a multi-scale approach to the study of costs and benefits of flexible generation options (from power plant operation simulation, to penetration in the electricity market, to role in the national energy system). The code and test model are documented aiming to 4RIA-compliance, i.e. aiming to be retrievable, reusable, reconstructible, reproducible, interoperable and auditable. They intend to propose a standard for documenting and testing the addition of functionalities to an open source modelling framework such as OSeMOSYS. They are annexed to the publication and fully available.