On the Regulatory and Economic Incentives for Renewable Hybrid Power Plants in Brazil

The complementarity between renewable generation profiles has been widely explored in the literature. Notwithstanding, the regulatory and economic frameworks for hybrid power plants add interesting challenges and opportunities for investors, regulators, and planners. Focusing on the Brazilian power market, this paper proposes a unified and isonomic firm energy certificate (FEC) calculation for non-controllable renewable generators, which allows us to 1) generalize the FEC concept for hybrid units and 2) capture the regulatory and economic synergies between sources. Based on the non-discriminatory FEC proposed for hybrid power plants, the co-optimization of both forward-market and network-access contracting strategies is studied, and its economic incentives are demonstrated. The optimal share of renewable sources composing the hybrid power plant is also considered in the model and analyzed in our case studies. Based on real data from the Brazilian power market, we quantify the benefits of the proposed market structures and model for a typical wind-solar hybrid unit.

Paper under review, authors’ e-print copy, May 2023.

Contact: street@puc-rio.br

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