The Economics of Wind and Solar Variability
As generation costs of wind and solar decrease into the range of fossil fuelled power, the system impacts of variability (intermittency) become crucial. With increasing shares of wind and solar PV, variability imposes technical challenges and additional costs to the energy system that can be in the same order of magnitude as generation costs. Falko discusses the most important drivers of these system costs, their implications and the role of flexibility options such as transmission grids, short- and long-term storage and demand response, mainly from an economic perspective.
This event is co-hosted with the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges.
Dr Falko Ueckerdt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He conducts research and policy advice in the field of energy system planning, in particular wind and solar power integration and modelling of climate mitigation scenarios. Since 2015, he is part of the IEA advisory group on grid integration of variable renewables. In the past, he worked in energy planning for the International Renewable Energy Agency (2015) and in e-mobility for the Boston Consulting Group (2009). He has been a contributing author to the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation of the IPCC (2011) and recently was a postdoctoral research scholar at the Hanley Sustainability Institute of the University of Dayton, Ohio (2016).