Reliability Analysis using Renewable Energy Sources

Abstract

This paper reviews some of the analytical methods developed in our laboratory for reliability evaluation of large scale power systems including renewable energy sources like photovoltaic units and wind farms. The methods presented here successfully reflect the correlations existing between the hourly load and the fluctuating energy outputs of unconventional generating units. Three different approaches, each an improvement over its predecessor, are presented for computing reliability indices like Loss of Load Expectation (LOLE) and Expected Unserved Energy (EUE). In the first approach, all the generation system models are combined hourly by means of an efficient algorithm for calculating the relevant reliability indices. The second approach uses a clustering algorithm for identifying a set of system states, such that the reliability indices are calculated for each state and then aggregated to yield overall values. The third approach introduces the concept of mean capacity outage tables for efficiently calculating EUE,