IESVic seminar: Energy storage as a non-wire transmission asset

Josif Figueroa

Wednesday, November 30

11:30 am - 12:30 pm (PDT)

Hybrid Event

In-person: ECS 660

Online: Zoom (details below)

In a power system, transmission infrastructure is required to deliver power from a generation site to a distribution network for eventual consumption by a load. To assess the need for future capital investment in transmission infrastructure, electric utilities and transmission system operators must accurately estimate the reliability levels of the power generation and transmission systems. The reliability of power generation and transmission systems are traditionally evaluated separately as their operations are independent. In light of efforts to decarbonize the energy grid, methods to incorporate energy storage and other non-conventional resources into the transmission planning process have been proposed to enhance existing transmission lines, thus negating the need to build new transmission infrastructure. Because energy storage is a depletable resource, the incorporation of storage into a transmission system creates a dependency between the generation and transmission systems in terms of the overall system reliability. With this challenge in mind, this project focuses on proposing a novel probabilistic planning framework to evaluate the overall composite generation and transmission system reliability and implementing this framework through the development of a probabilistic reliability evaluation tool that can estimate the effectiveness of energy storage in enhancing existing transmission lines by studying the effects of outages at system and node levels. The resulting tool, written in the Julia programming language, will be the first open-source composite system reliability (CSR) evaluation tool, which includes the Monte Carlo simulation technique and optimal power flow methods that can be extended in a collaborative manner.

Josif Figueroa is a graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Brunswick, a research assistant in the Sys-Model Lab, and a MITACS intern at New Brunswick Power Corp., tasked to develop a novel tool to study the incorporation of energy storage at the transmission level in New Brunswick. He is an experienced electrical engineer and power systems graduate from the University of Santiago of Chile, and is keen on applying computational methods to study power system planning and operations.

Zoom Meeting Link