William Blyth

Climate Change Policy Uncertainty and the Electricity Industry: Implications and Unintended Consequences

Power generation companies are among the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases and are, therefore, potentially among the most exposed companies when it comes to regulatory risk and uncertainties in climate change policy. In practice, however, their risk exposure is reduced by the ability of power companies to pass through the additional costs to the price of electricity. Uncertainties in climate change policy create a financial incentive for power generation companies to delay new build and to keep old plant running for longer. This may, in turn, lead to greenhouse gas emissions remaining higher for longer than would otherwise be the case. This paper considers the actions that need to be taken by policy makers to address the issues caused by policy uncertainty, and to accelerate investment in new build, low carbon generation.

Systematic Analysis of the Evolution of Electricity and Carbon Markets Under Deep Decarbonisation

The decarbonisation of electricity generation presents policy-makers in many countries with the delicate task of balancing initiatives for technological change whilst maintaining a commitment to market liberalisation. Despite the theoretical attractions, it has become debatable whether carbon markets by themselves can offer a complete solution. We address this through a modelling framework, stylised for the GB power market within the EU ETS, which includes three distinct components: (a) a long-term least-cost capacity planning model, similar in functionality to many used in policy analysis, but innovative in providing the endogenous calculation of carbon prices; (b) a short-term price risk model producing hourly dispatch and pricing outputs, which are used to test the annual financial performance risks implied by the longer-term investments; (c) an agent-based model which uses a computational learning algorithm to derive pricing behaviour in imperfect markets. The results indicate that the risk/return profile of electricity markets deteriorates substantially as a result of decarbonisation, reducing the propensity of companies to invest in the absence of increased government support. Markets may adjust, if allowed, by deferring investment until conditions improve, or by consolidating to increase market power, or by operating in a tighter market with reduced spare capacity. To the extent that each of these ‘market-led’ solutions may be politically unpalatable, policy design will need to sustain a delicate regulatory regime, moderating the increasing market power of companies whilst maintaining low-carbon subsidies for longer than expected.

A reduced actuation mecanum wheel platform for pipe inspection

This paper focuses on the design, development and assessment of a novel, 2 degrees-of-freedom magnetic pipe inspection robot. It consists of 4 mecanum wheels, with the diagonals functionally coupled and the system rotation constrained by the surface geometry, maintaining full translational mobility with reduced control and actuation requirements. The system uses positional encoding that is decoupled from the transmission system to overcome the main sources of positional/positioning errors when using mecanum wheels. The kinematic and dynamic models of the system are derived and integrated within the controller. The prototype robot is then tested and shown to follow a scan path at 20mm/s within ±1.5mm whilst correcting for gravitational drift and slip events.