The influence of individual wind feed-in time series on electricity spot market prices and their effect on the economic evaluation of storage systems

Already today, the growing share of renewable energy sources (RES) in the German energy market affects the price formation at the European Energy Exchange EEX. Accordingly many electricity market models are used for analyzing the effect of fluctuating feed-in of RES on spot market prices. This effect may be even more important for future spot market prices if shares of RES continue to grow. The high feed-in of wind and photovoltaic combined with load changes during the day lead to a different characteristic of residual load time series in the future and thus to a different operation mode of power plants and storage systems. It is common practice in electricity market modelling to use one base year for time series of feed-in by fluctuating RES and to upscale it to a higher level that is expected in the future. This approach leads to results that demonstrate solely the situation of one exemplary year and the influence of the feed-in characteristic is not discussed. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a fundamental model that is used for spot market price simulation with different base years. We compare the simulated spot market prices and find statistical evidence that price distributions differ for various input years of wind and load. We then use the simulated prices as input for a model that optimizes the operation of a pump storage system and find that some base years offer better conditions for the storage operation than others.