Speeding Up Renewable Energy Integration with Invisible Hands: Ancillary Service Market and the COVID-19 Natural Experiment
利用中国COVID-19封锁导致电力需求骤降作为自然实验，发现辅助服务市场能显著提升间歇性可再生能源发电，并估算建立全国性市场可抵消英国年碳排放的13%至17%。
Sustaining a high-renewable electricity generation portfolio has proved to be difficult due to grid flexibility constraints. We utilize the abrupt decline in electricity demand due to the COVID-19 lockdown in China as a policy experiment to study the role of ancillary service markets (ASMs) in promoting intermittent renewable energy integration. Our results reveal that provinces with ASMs sustained a significantly higher generation of intermittent renewable energy during the COVID-19 demand shock, which amounts to 9.7 percent of average monthly intermittent renewable energy generation during the shock. A back-of-envelope analysis further shows that annual carbon emission offset from establishing ASMs in all provinces of China could amount to 13 to 17 percent of annual carbon emissions from Britain in the near future when renewable energy penetration continues to go up.