Economic Performance of Fusion Power Plant on Deregulated Electricity Markets

Due to its complicated market mechanisms, conventional economic metrics such as Levelised Cost of Electricity may not be able to accurately represent the economic performance of nuclear fusion power plants on deregulated electricity markets. For this reason, this paper quantitatively analyzes the economic performance of steady-state fusion power plants on deregulated electricity markets for the first time with a newly constructed Simplified PJM Market Model. PJM is a successful regional transmission organization in the United States with approximately 180 GW of generating capacity. The results show that the economic performance of fusion power plant has higher sensitivity to the frequency of unplanned outages (including ones from plasma disruptions) on deregulated electricity markets. It is also indicated that the energy storage for plasma startups could be monetized through deregulated market mechanisms, which could turn into a unique advantage of future nuclear fusion power plants. The paper presents a case-study on a vital new area for the economic assessment of fusion power plant: the economic performance on the deregulated electricity market.