Nuclear energy plays an important role in the U.S.energy mix that will likely need to be maintained orstrengthened to achieve significant greenhouse gasreduction. However, maintaining the nuclear portfoliobecomes increasingly challenging in the current U.S.energy market since the low price of natural gas and thepenetration of subsidized and low-marginal cost variablerenewable electricity (VRE) are affecting the profitabilityof nuclear units. Within the U.S. Department of Energy,Office of Nuclear Energy, the System Analysis andIntegration campaign has been acquiring the capability tomodel energy market economics in order to supportdecision makers and nuclear utilities.Capacity expansion problems are solved with theGCAM and MARKAL models, simulating the energymarkets in different U.S. and world regions to provide ascenario-based long-term perspective. The EDGAR(Economic Dispatch Genetic AlgoRithms) code solves thecombined Unit Commitment and Economic Dispatchproblems to find the optimal schedule of a fleet ofgenerating units to meet the forecasted grid demand overthe next day in deregulated markets with an hourly timeresolution. EDGAR relies on sets of load demand andrenewable generation data with a one-hour time-step thatcan be generated out of historical data using the VARMA(Vector Auto-Regressive Moving Average) model inRAVEN (Risk Analysis Virtual ENvironment), tocondensate the full-year of data into a few representativedays for EDGAR to simulate.This full suite of market economic analysis codes wasused to model the New York Independent System Operatorregion in order to demonstrate the capabilities acquiredwithin the Campaign for daily market analysis. NY-ISOwas selected because it is a mostly deregulated market witha significant fraction of nuclear and wind generationsforeseen in 2050. The GCAM model predicts a decrease innuclear capacity of 53.0% and large increases of installedcapacities of both wind (340.6%) and other renewables(330.5%). Simulating this scenario demonstrated theinstalled capacity is sufficient to meet the demand andreserve requirements at every time of the year, and that theVRE generation will not lead to exceeding generation if their curtailment is allowed or if nuclear load following isimplemented.
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