Electricity grid in-feed from renewable sources: A risk for pumped-storage hydro plants?

The ongoing large-scale deployment of new renewable energy sources (RES), mostly in the form of wind turbines and photovoltaic (PV) units, causes an increasing share of stochastic electricity in-feed, which inevitably has impacts on electricity spot markets. In this paper, an analysis of the impacts of RES in-feeds on the spot market price spread as well as its volatility is presented. The potential risk that these impacts on spot prices may pose for the business model of pumped-storage hydro plants is discussed. Furthermore, the dependency of spot prices on wind turbine and PV electricity in-feeds are studied. The presented analysis focuses on the situation in Germany with its, in relative and absolute terms, high share of stochastic electricity in-feed and its mature spot market.