Abstract for: Assessing renewable energies on the sustainability of the power sector

In the late 1980s, Argentina faced a lack of investment in generation capacity, high electricity demand, and frequent blackouts. This lead to the liberalisation and privatisation of public utilities from Argentina, which became one of the first developing countries to implement this process. A similar situation was faced in 2015, when the Argentine electricity market confront a crisis caused by low capacity investment, since electricity prices did not reflect the real cost of power generators. Recently, argentine government has called auction to increase generation capacity and avoid increases in the electricity prices. In addition, Argentina’s government is promoting policies to encourage renewable energy, though security of supply may be affected by intermittent renewable energies. Thus, Argentine electricity market is modelled to understand the effect of renewable energies on the sustainability of the power sector. This paper presents a simulation model to analyse policies that increase generation capacity and promote renewable energy; particularly, it is studied the effects of these policies on the security of supply, affordability and environment. It is concluded that for the Argentine case, renewable energies reduce energy dependence on fossil fuels, but increase electricity prices due to their high investment costs in comparison with conventional energies, additionally, it may be produced idle renewable energy capacity.