Abstract
Recently, harmful gases emitted into the atmosphere disrupt the balance of nature and cause climate changes. The tendency towards renewable energy is increasing in order to prevent climate change. The importance of the conventional power plants in the power system is maintained due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources. In this regard, nuclear power which is one of the conventional power plants takes attention. In this study, a new approach for optimal scheduling of a Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES) integrated Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) system is proposed. It is expected that PHES provides significant economic contribution to the grid operator especially by ensuring energy supply security of the NPP. Two different market types named Day Ahead Market (DAM) and Balancing Market (BM) in Turkey are implemented in the trades by using real electricity prices obtained from Energy Exchange Istanbul (EXIST), which is Energy Market Operator in Turkey. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, seasonal impacts of four different months are also examined in several case studies. Furthermore, sustainability analyzes are conducted considering probability of interruption of the NPP during 8 hours. According to the results, it is observed that promising solutions can be obtained thanks to the integration of the PHES in the presence of the different market types even if outages are planned.