Abstract:
Electricity is one of the key driving forces of the economy of a country and
generation of electricity in an optimal way to meet the increasing demand has
become a national priority in the recent years. Due to serious concerns with regard to
energy security, global warming, rising costs and depleting reserves of fossil fuels,
many countries are now actively seeking to mainstream NCRE power generation in
to their generation portfolios as a future energy solution. Since generation planning
plays a major role in a country’s efforts to mainstream NCRE developments, the Sri
Lankan generation planning practices were examined and several methodological
changes and models were proposed to successfully integrate and evaluate NCRE
resources in the present planning approaches.
The CEB generation planning process was reviewed and associated issues
concerning NCRE planning were identified. These issues were first addressed
conceptually and the proposed solutions were subsequently applied to the Sri Lankan
system to assess their applicability. This thesis provides a new insight into the
capacity contribution of NCRE plants and also discusses the constraints to
mainstream adoption of NCRE technologies in Sri Lanka along with the present
policy and regulatory interventions relating to NCRE developments. The use of peak
period capacity factor method was suggested to calculate the capacity credit of
NCRE generation and since the associated risks are not explicitly evaluated in the
present approaches, the Mean Variance Portfolio Theory is proposed to assess the
risks of generation portfolios. Two models were developed to calculate the wind
power output from wind measurement data and to evaluate the portfolio risks of
generation mixes which can be readily used in the present practices. In addition,
methodologies were presented to model a wind power plant in WASP IV and to
evaluate the benefits of modeled NCRE plants.
