Projects:2018s1-140 Energy Storage Requirements for the SA Grid

Introduction

Project Title: 140 - Investigation of storage optimization strategies for the National Electricity Market, with emphasis on South Australia.

Team Members

Julius Bullas Paul Citti

Supervisors

Derek Abbott David Vowles

Advisors

Holger Maier Angus Simpson Wen Soong

Abstract

SA obtains approximately 45% of its electrical energy from renewable sources – large scale wind and small scale solar PV. To reliably integrate these intermittent sources into the grid will increasingly require energy storage in a variety of forms such as pumped-hydro and batteries together with virtual energy storage in the form of demand side management. The storage requirement will progressively increase as controllable fossil fuel generation sources are withdrawn from the system. The objective of this project is to develop tools to assess the energy storage requirements to ensure reliable supply with high levels of intermittent generation. This project commenced in 2017 and the two honours students involved did a very fine job in achieving several early objectives. Much work remains to be done, including the following: (1) Serve the time-series data via the web so that it can be analysed and graphically displayed in various ways online. (2) Extend the data analysis and graphical display toolbox to allow the user to rapidly identify and display interesting features and periods within the data. (3) Extend the storage optimization approaches to consider alternative optimization objectives and future scenarios. (4) To estimate storage requirements for Australia as a whole assuming a hypothetical 100% renewable scenario and hypothetical interconnected Australia. (There are a number of similarities but also critical differences with the water storage problem. In this aspect of the project we will draw on the considerable experience in Civil Engineering in the area of water network optimization.)