The world of power generation is currently facing a number of challenges and uncertainties, caused by technical, economic, political, geographical and social factors. Manufacturers of power generation equipment have to design their strategies for technology development taking into account these challenges and uncertainties. They have to set goals for the medium and the long term, which involve the commitment of huge amounts of resources. At the same time, given the uncertainty of the future, they have to try to reduce their risks. Scenario-Based Planning is a methodology to deal with uncertainty in making decisions for the long term. It does not tell planners what will probably happen but helps them to understand what may happen through an understanding of the relationships of cause and effect within the environment of interest. Taking gas turbines as an example, this paper shows an application of the method to the evaluation of the markets related to different primary energy sources and different technologies, within power generation scenarios given by the 1EA and scenarios proposed in previous papers by the author. Although current power generation gas turbines are predominantly designed to burn natural gas, developments based on other primary energy sources will require gas turbines to run with different fuels (synthetic gas or hydrogen, for example), helium or CO_2 (in high temperature nuclear reactor systems) or hot air (in hybrid solar thermal power systems). Wind power may also require backup from gas turbines, probably incorporating significant fuel flexibility. An estimate of the value of the potential markets related to these different applications of gas turbines is made in this paper. Historical and estimated experience curves for the technologies of interest and their dependence relationships are used in this analysis, with a system dynamics model as described in [1].
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