Sensitivity Analysis of a Nuclear Hybrid Energy System With Thermal Energy Storage in Deregulated Electricity Markets Considering Time Series Uncertainty in Electricity Price

Abstract

Adding thermal energy storage to nuclear power plants has been proposed as a way to allow nuclear plants to operate more flexibly and potentially be more competitive in deregulated electricity markets. The economics of these systems in deregulated markets are subject to uncertainties in capital costs, operating costs, and revenue. This study quantifies the uncertainty in the net present value of a nuclear power plant with integrated thermal energy storage in three U.S. deregulated electricity markets considering these sources of uncertainty and quantifies, for the first time, the relative contributions each source makes to the overall uncertainty. To accomplish this, a computationally efficient block bootstrap method is introduced to quantify uncertainty contributions from the stochastic time series of electricity prices, achieving a two order of magnitude decrease computational time compared to the model-based methods used in previous works while also relaxing several strict assumptions made by the model-based approach. Up to 18.5% of the overall variance in net present value is attributable to variance in the electricity price stochastic process, with this sensitivity varying significantly across markets.