Mainstreaming renewable energy developments into traditional planning

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.