Control and management of renewable generation — Necessity of look ahead study

With exponential demographic growth, considerable demand of power and consumption of electricity is envisaged not only in India but throughout the planet. Major portion of the current energy being generated from fossil fuels, raises concern over carbon foot print due to emissions of greenhouse gases. On the other side, harnessing more power from renewable sources, brings three major challenges to the operator - i) power balance to maintain grid frequency with mixed portfolio of conventional and mostly intermittent renewable sources ii) maintain stability of the grid caused by unanticipated oscillations due to low inertia of these sources, and iii) congestion management of transmission assets while evacuating power from far locations. Only real time monitoring of the assets may not be sufficient. Under this perspective, this paper emphasizes the necessity of advanced look ahead study to blend the forecast and real time calculations to include various scenarios that potentially could happen in the presence of these renewable generation assets.