Flexible operation strategies for coal- and gas-CCS power stations under the UK and USA markets

The increased penetration of the intermittent renewable energy has increased the demand for flexible electricity supply. In this work, we evaluate four distinct strategies for flexible operation of CCS power plants: load following, solvent storage, exhaust gas by-pass and variable solvent regeneration (VSR) for coal-and gas-CCS power stations. With the aim to decoupling the power and capture plants in order to maximize profits, a multi-period dynamic optimisation problem was formulated and solved in the context of UK-and US-type markets. It was found that whilst the flexible operation strategies are strongly affected by the different markets, in all cases the variable solvent (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.