Strategic real option and flexibility analysis for nuclear power plants considering uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance
Strategic real option and flexibility analysis for nuclear power plants considering uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance
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DOI：
10.1016/j.eneco.2017.03.023
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发表时间：
2017-05
期刊：
影响因子：
12.8
通讯作者：
Michel-Alexandre Cardin;Sizhe Zhang;W. Nuttall
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Michel-Alexandre Cardin;Sizhe Zhang;W. Nuttall
核电是一种重要的能源，特别是考虑到二氧化碳排放和全球变暖。然而，当考虑到长期电力需求的不确定性以及更重要的是公众接受程度时，部署核电站可能是具有挑战性的。对于新兴经济体(如印度、中国)来说尤其如此，这些经济体在不断发展的经济背景下减少碳足迹，同时适应不断增长的人口和显著变化的人口结构，以及最近发生的可能影响公众对核技术看法的事件。在福岛第一核电站灾难发生后，公众的接受在全球范围内继续运行和部署新的核电系统方面发挥了核心作用。在看到重要的长期人口变化的国家，可能很难确定未来所需的能力，随着时间的推移在何时何地部署，并以最经济的方式。现有关于能力部署的研究通常没有在长期能力部署分析(例如+40年)中考虑这种不确定性驱动因素。针对这些问题，本文提出了一种基于战略柔性思想和管理决策规则的不确定性核电系统设计和容量配置的新方法。这种方法能够更主动地应对不确定性，并有助于确定在多个地点部署新核能力的最经济部署路径。这项研究的一个创新之处在于，明确承认公众的接受程度与长期电力需求一样，是影响经济表现的一个重要的不确定性驱动因素。另一个新奇之处在于如何利用灵活性的概念来处理不确定性和改进预期的生命周期绩效(例如成本)。通过将决策规则表示为非预期约束的多阶段随机规划框架，开发和分析了新的设计和部署策略。这种方法提供了一种新的方法来设计和分析适应策略，考虑到长期的不确定性波动，比标准实物期权分析技术获得的典型解决方案更直观，更容易被系统操作员使用，后者通常用于分析大规模、不可逆转投资项目的灵活性。根据电力需求和公众接受程度的不确定性，该研究考虑了三种灵活性策略：1)在时间和空间上分阶段(或分阶段)进行容量部署；2)现场容量扩展；3)延长寿命。数值分析表明，柔性设计比刚性最优设计部署策略具有更好的性能，并且结合上述策略的最柔性设计方案的性能优于较刚性和较不灵活的设计方案。研究还表明，在所研究的所有三种策略中，灵活设计从分阶段和扩容策略中获益最为显著。鉴于世界各地围绕新核建设的持续挑战，研究结果为正在考虑部署新核设施的国家的政策和决策提供了有用的见解。
Nuclear power is an important energy source especially in consideration of CO2emissions and global warming. Deploying nuclear power plants, however, may be challenging when uncertainty in long-term electricity demand and more importantly public acceptance are considered. This is true especially for emerging economies (e.g., India, China) concerned with reducing their carbon footprint in the context of growing economic development, while accommodating a growing population and significantly changing demographics, as well as recent events that may affect the public's perception of nuclear technology. In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, public acceptance has come to play a central role in continued operations and deployment of new nuclear power systems worldwide. In countries seeing important long-term demographic changes, it may be difficult to determine the future capacity needed, when and where to deploy it over time, and in the most economic manner. Existing studies on capacity deployment typically do not consider such uncertainty drivers in long-term capacity deployment analyses (e.g., + 40 years). To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach to nuclear power systems design and capacity deployment under uncertainty that exploits the idea of strategic flexibility and managerial decision rules. The approach enables dealing more pro-actively with uncertainty and helps identify the most economic deployment paths for new nuclear capacity deployment over multiple sites. One novelty of the study lies in the explicit recognition of public acceptance as an important uncertainty driver affecting economic performance, along with long-term electricity demand. Another novelty is in how the concept of flexibility is exploited to deal with uncertainty and improve expected lifecycle performance (e.g. cost). New design and deployment strategies are developed and analyzed through a multistage stochastic programming framework where decision rules are represented as non-anticipative constraints. This approach provides a new way to devise and analyze adaptation strategies in view of long-term uncertainty fluctuations that is more intuitive and readily usable by system operators than typical solutions obtained from standard real options analysis techniques, which are typically used to analyze flexibility in large-scale, irreversible investment projects. The study considers three flexibility strategies subject to uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance: 1) phasing (or staging) capacity deployment over time and space, 2) on-site capacity expansion, and 3) life extension. Numerical analysis shows that flexible designs perform better than rigid optimal design deployment strategies, and the most flexible design combining the above strategies outperforms both more rigid and less flexible design alternatives. It is also demonstrated that a flexible design benefits from the strategies of phasing and capacity expansion most significantly across all three strategies studied. The results provide useful insights for policy and decision-making in countries that are considering new nuclear facility deployment, in light of ongoing challenges surrounding new nuclear builds worldwide.