Resilience and performance of the power grid with high penetration of renewable energy sources: the Balearic Islands as a case study

TL;DR

This study evaluates the resilience and performance of the Balearic Islands' power grid with high renewable energy integration, demonstrating that solar and wind can significantly replace conventional plants while maintaining reliability.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed modeling approach incorporating fluctuations and storage, showing the potential for high renewable penetration with manageable risk.

Findings

Solar can replace up to 30% of capacity without reliability loss.

Source redundancy allows over 80% demand coverage with oversizing.

Moderate storage maintains system resilience with high renewable share.

Abstract

We analyze the dynamics of the power grid with a high penetration of renewable energy sources using the ORNL-PSERC-Alaska (OPA) model. In particular we consider the power grid of the Balearic Islands with a high share of solar photovoltaic power as a case study. Day-to-day fluctuations of the solar generation and the use of storage are included in the model. Resilience is analyzed through the blackout distribution and performance is measured as the average fraction of the demand covered by solar power generation. We find that with the present consumption patterns and moderate storage, solar generation can replace conventional power plants without compromising reliability up to $30\%$ of the total installed capacity. We also find that using source redundancy it is possible to cover up to $80\%$ or more of the demand with solar plants, while keeping the risk similar to that with full conventional generation. However this requires oversizing the installed solar power to be at least $2.5$ larger than the average demand. The potential of wind energy is also briefly discussed