Development of System Dynamics model for Electric Power Plant Construction in a Competitive Market

경쟁체제 하에서의 발전소 건설 시스템 다이내믹스 모델 개발

This paper describes the forecast of power plant construction in a competitive korean electricity market. In Korea, KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation, fully controlled by government) was responsible for from the production of the electricity to the sale of electricity to customer. However, the generation part is separated from KEPCO and six generation companies were established for whole sale competition from April 1st, 2001. The generation companies consist of five fossil power companies and one nuclear power company in Korea at present time. Fossil power companies are scheduled to be sold to private companies including foreign investors. Nuclear power company is owned and controlled by government. The competition in generation market will start from 2003. ISO (Independence System Operator will purchase the electricity from the power exchange market. The market price is determined by the SMP(System Marginal Price) which is decided by the balance between demand and supply of electricity in power exchange market. Under this uncertain circumstance, the energy policy planners such as government are interested to the construction of the power plant in the future. These interests are accelerated due to the recent shortage of electricity supply in California. In the competitive market, investors are no longer interested in the investment for the capital intensive, long lead time generating technologies such as nuclear and coal plants. Large unclear and coal plants were no longer the top choices. Instead, investors in the competitive market are interested in smaller, more efficient, cheaper, cleaner technologies such as CCGT(Combined Cycle Gas Turbine). Electricity is treated as commodity in the competitive market. The investors behavior in the commodity market shows that the new investment decision is made when the market price exceeds the sum of capital cost and variable cost of the new facility and the existing facility utilization depends on the marginal cost of the facility. This investors behavior can be applied to the new investments for the power plant. Under these postulations, there is the potential for power plant construction to appear in waves causing alternating periods of over and under supply of electricity like commodity production or real estate production. A computer model was developed to sturdy the possibility that construction will appear in waves of boom and bust in Korean electricity market. This model was constructed using System Dynamics method pioneered by Forrester(MIT, 1961) and explained in recent text by Sternman (Business Dynamics, MIT, 2000) and the recent work by Andrew Ford(Energy Policy, 1999). This model was designed based on the Energy Policy results(Ford, 1999) with parameters for loads and resources in Korea. This Korea Market Model was developed and tested in a small scale project to demonstrate the usefulness of the System Dynamics approach. Korea electricity market is isolated and not allowed to import electricity from outsides. In this model, the base load such as unclear and large coal power plant are assumed to be user specified investment and only CCGT is selected for new investment by investors in the market. This model may be used to learn if government investment in new unclear plants could compensate for the unstable actions of private developers. This model can be used to test the policy focused on the role of unclear investments over time. This model also can be used to test whether the future power plant construction can meet the government targets for the mix of generating resources and to test whether to maintain stable price in the spot market.