KW21 I

RESEARCH NETWORK POWER PLANTS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

E 4 Criteria for investments in power plants in the liberalised market

In the forthcoming years, companies in the energy industry are going to be faced with decisions of long-term investments that involve high capital expenditure. The associated Subproject E 4, which is funded by the Baden-Württemberg Energy Research Foundation and Siemens AG, aims for developing methods to support these decisions. For that purpose, the relevant long-term uncertainties are going to be identified and characterised, respectively, by scenarios and stochastic models to be developed. This will lead to a market model in order to specify the long-term equilibrium prices, the corresponding composition of the power generation portfolio and the transition to equilibrium prices. Furthermore, methods for the determination of the optimal power plant portfolio’s structure of one individual generating company and for the evaluation of particular investments will be evolved. These methods are going to be applied with an analysis of selected investment decisions.