Load research as a tool in electric power system planning,operation, and control—The case of Jordan

Electric load research involves the systematic collection and analysis of customers’ electrical energy as well as demand requirements by time-of-day, month, season, and year; consumption patterns; socio-economic and demographic influencing factors; and willingness-to-pay for electricity. The information created by load research are the bases for all studies and analyses conducted by the electricity company to plan, monitor, operate, and control the power system. Several attempts were carried out in Jordan to create this very important body of knowledge. Studies and analyses are conducted regularly to update the information. This paper presents the author's experience in conducting load research investigations. These efforts culminated in three distinct contributions, which are still very useful in planning and operation of the power system in Jordan. (1) The first contribution by the author is related to creating a huge database of energy and electricity consumption characteristics, trends, and driving forces. The database is being continuously updated and as such constitutes a very basic tool for all demand forecasting and other planning studies. (2) The second contribution involves the estimation of the cost of un-served (unmet) electrical energy due to outages. This estimate, which is still being used as reference for planning studies carried out in Jordan, was first coined by the author at 1.0US$/kWh. (3) The final contribution concerns the use of the information in the load research database and the accumulated experience in determining peak load composition. This effort created the “near-exact” estimate of the characteristics and constitutions of the peak load divided among the various consuming sectors as well as among the various end-uses in Jordan. The results of these contributions are still being used by the electricity sector in Jordan until this day, either as unique information or as a guideline or reference to more recent estimates. More importantly, the efforts, as outlined in the three contributions above, have established a good base and reference point for further ongoing activities to collect, analyze, and use the information by various entities in the electricity sector in Jordan. However, the efforts need to be properly coordinated and entrusted with a single entity to ensure a better quality of information and avoid conflicting decisions.     

Implications of private sector participation in power generation—a case study from India

India suffers from widespread shortages of electricity supply. These shortages, among others, are detrimental to the economic growth. The prospects for the next decade do not seem to be much brighter. Efforts in expanding generation capacity by the state-owned electric utilities are hampered by severe resource constraints. Against this backdrop, to mobilize additional resources to help bridge the gap in demand and supply, the Government of India formulated a policy in 1991 with the objective to encourage greater investment by private enterprises in the electricity sector. To study the implications of such an initiative on various stakeholders, viz., public utilities, consumers and private sector, the present paper tries to analyse issues like planned rationing, guarantees to private sector, backing down of existing capacity. Using the state of Karnataka (in Southern India) as a case study, the paper develops multiple scenarios using an integrated mixed integer-programming model. The results show the advantage of marginal non-supply (rationing) of electricity in terms of achieving overall effective supply demand matching as well as providing economic benefits to the state that could be generated through cost savings. The results also show the negative impacts of high guarantees offered to the private sector in terms of the opportunity costs of reduced utilization of both the existing and the new public capacity. The estimated generation losses and the associated economic impacts of backing down of existing and new public capacity on account of guarantees are found to be significantly high. For 2011–12, depending on the type of scenarios, the estimated generation and economic losses are likely to be in the range of 3200–10,000 GWh and Rs. 4200–13,600 million respectively. The impact of these losses on the consumers could be in terms of significant increase in energy bills (in the range of 19–40% for different scenarios) due to rise in tariffs.     

Life cycle sustainability assessment of electricity options for the UK

The UK electricity mix will change significantly in the future. This provides an opportunity to consider the full life cycle sustainability of the options currently considered as most suitable for the UK: gas, nuclear, offshore wind and photovoltaics (PV). In an attempt to identify the most sustainable options and inform policy, this paper applies a sustainability assessment framework developed previously by the authors to compare these electricity options. To put discussion in context, coal is also considered as a significant contributor to the current electricity supply. Each option is assessed and compared in terms of its economic, environmental and social implications, using a range of sustainability indicators. The results show that no one technology is superior and that certain trade‐offs must be made. For example, nuclear and offshore wind power have the lowest life cycle environmental impacts, except for freshwater ecotoxicity for which gas is the best option; coal and gas are the cheapest options (£74 and 66/MWh, respectively, at 10% discount), but both have high global warming potential (1072 and 379 g CO₂ eq./kWh); PV has relatively low global warming potential (88 g CO₂ eq./kWh) but high cost (£302/MWh), as well as high ozone layer and resource depletion. Nuclear, wind and PV increase some aspects of energy security: in the case of nuclear, this is due to inherent fuel storage capabilities (energy density 290 million times that of natural gas), whereas wind and PV decrease fossil fuel import requirements by up to 0.2 toe/MWh. However, all three options require additional installed capacity for grid management. Nuclear also poses complex risk and intergenerational questions such as the creation of 10.16 m³/TWh of nuclear waste for long‐term geological storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fuzzy Multi-actor Multi-criteria Decision Making for sustainability assessment of biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production

The purpose of this paper is to develop a sustainability assessment method to rank the prior sequence of biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production. A novel fuzzy Multi-actor Multi-criteria Decision Making method which allows multiple groups of decision-makers to use linguistic variables to assess the biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production has been developed. Fifteen criteria relevant to in economic, environmental, technological and social-political aspects have been used in sustainability assessment. Four biomass-based technologies including pyrolysis, conventional gasification, supercritical water gasification and fermentative hydrogen production have been studied by the proposed method, and biomass gasification has been considered as the most sustainable scenario and can be chosen for further development.     

Developing an integrated sustainability and resilience framework of indicators for the assessment of low-carbon energy technologies at the local level

Sustainability indicators have been broadly used to assess energy technologies both at the national and local levels. However, very few studies have addressed the issue of resilience of energy technologies. Moreover, there is a lack of an integrated framework that combines both sustainability and resilience indicators for the assessment of energy technologies. The aim of this paper is to present the development of an integrated framework of sustainability and resilience indicators for the assessment of low-carbon energy technologies at the local level in Europe. The selection of indicators is based on a modified ‘3S’ approach, composed of literature review, self-validation, scientific validation, and social validation. The study incorporates local stakeholders’ feedback on the selection and validation of evaluation criteria based on a European survey. The vast majority of respondents approved and validated the indicators that were selected through the internal and experts’ validation steps.     

Power system economics : The value of natural gas in electricity generation

The study reported in this paper is concerned with assessing the value of natural gas in power generation. It had previously been assumed that this value is equal to price(s) of displaced fuel(s). A methodology is derived to assess this value in integrated supply systems and results are derived for a hypothetical system. It is shown that the value is system specific and may be equal to, greater than or less than the value of displaced fuel. The methodology and results reported are relevant to the debate on gas parity pricing.     

The case for combined heat and power in the U.K.

Most analyses of the potential for combined heat and power (CHP) in parallel with a central electricity generating industry value the electrical output by means of an assessment of the marginal benefit to the central supply of units and capacity provided by the local system. This approach has defects, especially when applied to a growing system with a choice of investments. This paper suggests an alternative approach without these defects. It concludes that CHP is extremely attractive if load factors on the local plant are high, as in industry. This conclusion is insensitive to future costs of fuel and plant. If there were enough sites of this nature then there would be no case for CHP from district heating loads. If, however, high-load-factor sites are not available then CHP from district heating could be a second best alternative. the paper investigates this hypothesis and concludes that this may be so, but that in this case the answer is very sensitive to future costs of fuel and plant.     

Challenges and options for a large wind power uptake by the European electricity system

The contribution of renewable energies (in particular of wind power) to the electrical power generation has been continuously increasing in the recent decades. This article focuses on the necessary options that manage the variability of wind turbine output and enable the large scale integration of wind power with the current electricity system, such as additional power reserves, distributed storage technologies, in particular electric vehicles, and cross-boarder power transmission. The influence of geographical distribution of wind turbines on the produced power variability is described as well. The article highlights that even though state-of-art technologies for higher wind integration are present, there is a necessity for the proper management and integration of mentioned options.     

Electricity market price volatility: The case of Ontario

Price volatility analysis has been reported in the literature for most competitive electricity markets around the world. However, no studies have been published yet that quantify price volatility in the Ontario electricity market, which is the focus of the present paper. In this paper, a comparative volatility analysis is conducted for the Ontario market and its neighboring electricity markets. Volatility indices are developed based on historical volatility and price velocity concepts, previously applied to other electricity market prices, and employed in the present work. The analysis is carried out in two scenarios: in the first scenario, the volatility indices are determined for the entire price time series. In the second scenario, the price time series are broken up into 24 time series for each of the 24 h and volatility indices are calculated for each specific hour separately. The volatility indices are also applied to the locational marginal prices of several pricing points in the New England, New York, and PJM electricity markets. The outcomes reveal that price volatility is significantly higher in Ontario than the three studied neighboring electricity markets. Furthermore, comparison of the results of this study with similar findings previously published for 15 other electricity markets demonstrates that the Ontario electricity market is one of the most volatile electricity markets world-wide. This high volatility is argued to be associated with the fact that Ontario is a single-settlement, real-time market.     

Sustainability indicators for the assessment of nuclear power

Electricity supplies an increasing share of the world’s total energy demand and that contribution is set to increase. At the same time, there is increasing socio-political will to mitigate impacts of climate change as well as to improve energy security. This, in combination with the desire to ensure social and economic prosperity, creates a pressing need to consider the sustainability implications of future electricity generation. However, approaches to sustainability assessment differ greatly in their scope and methodology as currently there is no standardised approach. With this in mind, this paper reviews sustainability indicators that have previously been used to assess energy options and proposes a new sustainability assessment methodology based on a life cycle approach. In total, 43 indicators are proposed, addressing the techno-economic, environmental and social sustainability issues associated with energy systems. The framework has been developed primarily to address concerns associated with nuclear power in the UK, but is applicable to other energy technologies as well as to other countries.     

Technical assessment of the use of a small-scale wind power system to meet the demand for electricity in a land aquafarm in Taiwan

Due to the widespread aquaculture at coastal area in Taiwan and high wind power potential in the sites, it is worthy to carry out the technical potential assessments of small-scale wind power system used for aquaculture in Taiwan. The present work analyzed wind power potential, described the practical installation, measured the actual energy output, verified the reliability of the energy output estimation method and elucidated important considerations associated with the use of this estimation method. The relationship between the actual energy generated and the wind speed characteristics were thus introduced. The power quality produced by a small-scale wind power generator was also evaluated.     

Methodology for modelling plug-in electric vehicles in the power system and cost estimates for a system with either smart or dumb electric vehicles

The article estimates the costs of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) in a future power system as well as the benefits from smart charging and discharging EVs (smart EVs). To arrive in a good estimate, a generation planning model was used to create power plant portfolios, which were operated in a more detailed unit commitment and dispatch model. In both models the charging and discharging of EVs is optimised together with the rest of the power system. Neither the system cost nor the market price of electricity for EVs turned out to be high (36-263 €/vehicle/year in the analysed scenarios). Most of the benefits of smart EVs come from smart timing of charging although benefits are also accrued from provision of reserves and lower power plant portfolio cost. The benefits of smart EVs are 227 €/vehicle/year. This amount has to cover all expenses related to enabling smart EVs and need to be divided between different actors. Additional benefits could come from the avoidance of grid related costs of immediate charging, but these were not part of the analysis.     

Own power: Motives of having electricity without the energy company

New technologies will enable households to generate an increasing amount of their own electricity. Intentions to generate own power are a preliminary step towards actual behavior. Because own generation is still very limited and the behavior of early adopters may not be representative for the complete population, our study focuses on intentions rather than actual behavior. A consumer survey among 2047 Dutch households reveals that environmental concerns are the most important driver of a household's intention to generate its own power. Affinity with technology and energy and the reputation of electricity companies are also significant drivers, but financial factors and power outages are not. About 40% of Dutch households have an intention to generate their own power, with an overrepresentation of young households. This group falls apart in two sub segments; for the “generating savers” (21%) a high intention to generate own power coincides with a high intention to save energy, whereas generating users (18%) combine a high intention to generate own power with a low intention to save energy.     

Energy,exergy, and sustainability a novel comparison of conventional gas turbine with fuel cell integrated hybrid power cycle

In this paper, six novel modified exergy relations are explored to determine the precise estimation of exergy destruction and to identify which component has the most improvement potential. For this, three power generation cycles are considered, i.e., simple gas turbine (SGT), recuperated gas turbine (RGT), are compared with a novel hybrid system (SOFC-RGT: Solid Oxide Fuel Cell-RGT), which operates with fuel flexibility as well as enhanced work-output and thermal efficiency. For energy, exergy, and sustainability studies, numerical modeling is conducted using MATLAB. At r_p = 4, TIT = 1250 K, an exclusive comparison has been made between proposed configurations based on thermodynamic modeling and exergy-based sustainability index. It is found that with the inclusion of a recuperator and a fuel cell in the proposed cycles, the thermal and sustainability performance tend to increase significantly. Whereas, exergy destruction increases but has minimal impact on comparing thermal performance and sustainability index. In terms of sustainability, RGT is 30.76% more sustainable than SGT, while SOFC-GT is 63.39% more sustainable than RGT.     

Developing a sustainability framework for the assessment of bioenergy systems

The potential for biomass to contribute to energy supply in a low-carbon economy is well recognised. However, for the sector to contribute fully to sustainable development in the UK, specific exploitation routes must meet the three sets of criteria usually recognised as representing the tests for sustainability: economic viability in the market and fiscal framework within which the supply chain operates; environmental performance, including, but not limited to, low carbon dioxide emissions over the complete fuel cycle; and social acceptability, with the benefits of using biomass recognised as outweighing any negative social impacts. This paper describes an approach to developing a methodology to establish a sustainability framework for the assessment of bioenergy systems to provide practical advice for policy makers, planners and the bioenergy industry, and thus to support policy development and bioenergy deployment at different scales. The approach uses multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and decision-conferencing, to explore how such a process is able to integrate and reconcile the interests and concerns of diverse stakeholder groups.     

Multi-criteria sustainability assessment and decision-making framework for hydrogen pathways prioritization: An extended ELECTRE method under hybrid information

Hydrogen has been received more and more attentions because of its advantage in terms of low environmental impact and high energy density. However, the sustainability priorities of different hydrogen production pathways have not been determined. To assist the sustainability-oriented selection of hydrogen production pathways, a prioritization framework needs to be built. However, the data collected from different sources consisting of hybrid information, such as crisp numbers, interval numbers, and fuzzy numbers, increases the difficulty of sustainability-oriented decision-making. Therefore, this study aims to develop a sustainability prioritization framework for hydrogen production pathways under hybrid information. The Z-number Best Worst Method (ZBWM) is applied to quantify the weight of each criterion from the views of decision-makers in the forms of Z-number. The ELECTRE method has been extended to prioritize the alternatives under the context of hybrid information. An illustrative case including five hydrogen production processes is used to illustrate the proposed prioritization framework from environmental, social, economic, and technical aspects, and the results show that biomass hydrogen technology is the most sustainable choice. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed model, other three multi-criteria decision making methods were also used to determine the sustainability rankings of these five hydrogen production pathways, and the comparisons reveal that this method is feasible.     

The benefits of transmission expansions in the competitive electricity markets

The paper presents an innovative method for assessing simultaneously technical and economic benefits of transmission expansions. This method takes into account the new needs of the transmission planning process for competitive electricity markets, in which benefits of major transmission expansions include: (a) improved reliability, (b) increased availability of efficient supply and (c) increased competition among suppliers.     

Fuel cell power conditioning system design for residential application

This paper presents a design of a high performance proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) power conditioning system (PCS) for residential application. Firstly, a high efficiency PCS topology is described which can improve the PCS maximum efficiency up to 92.9%. Furthermore, a novel PCS controller is presented, which succeeds in suppressing the low frequency current ripple, controlling the dc link voltage and inverter output current. The controller also achieves reliable power grid integration. The experimental results show that a residential fuel cell PCS with high performance can be achieved.     

A study on sustainability analysis of solid oxide fuel cell and proton exchange membrane electrolyzer integrated hybrid multi-generation system

The main objective of this study is to perform the sustainability analysis of a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer (PEME) and solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) integrated hybrid multi-generation system that is designed to operate in four modes. In this regard, the effects of performance parameters of PEME and SOFC systems on the sustainability of hybrid multi-generation system are parametrically investigated. Accordingly, in terms of hydrogen production, the best value of hydrogen production is estimated to be 33.09 kg/h for both M1 and M2 operating modes. Moreover, in terms of the sustainability indicators, the maximum power generation of the system is calculated to be 13.9 MW while maximum energy and exergy efficiencies and exergetic sustainability index are respectively obtained to be 89%, 47% and 0.85 in M3 operating mode. However, minimum total product cost per unit energy generation is estimated to be 15.64 $/GJ in M1 operating mode. Furthermore, in terms of the exergetic sustainability index, the maximum effect ratios of the SOFC and PEME on the hybrid multi-generation system are respectively determined to be 5.076 and 16.124 in M1 operating mode.     

EnerGis: A geographical information based system for the evaluation of integrated energy conversion systems in urban areas

A geographical information system has been developed to model the energy requirements of an urban area. The purpose of the platform is to model with sufficient detail the energy services requirements of a given geographical area in order to allow the evaluation of the integration of advanced integrated energy conversion systems. This tool is used to study the emergence of more efficient cities that realize energy efficiency measures, integrate energy efficient conversion technologies and promote the use of endogenous renewable energy. The model is illustrated with case studies for the energetic planning of the Geneva district (Switzerland).