Hesquiaht Power System Modeling Development
There are a number of powerful modeling tools available to simulate the economic performance and the technical performance of remote off grid power systems. HOMER is a commercial modeling product originally developed by NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States. HYBRID2 is another techno-economic modeling tool that was also developed by NREL and the University of Massachusetts in the late 1980’s. The challenges that face the techno-economic modeling of wave integration into remote community power systems is that there are so many unknowns such as capital costs, installation costs, O&M costs, component lifetime and so on.
In contrast, one of the strengths of modeling the Hot Springs Cove power system is the record of community load data in hourly time slices and the record of wave data near the community reserve. Most recently the WCWI power matrix development is the key data piece that will drive the model development to simulate the technical performance of wave energy integration. This will lead to developing an economic framework to measure and assess the impacts of wave power to reduce diesel fuel, the related CO2 emissions and to reduce the community’s levelized cost of energy ($/kWh).
The modeling is created in GAMS, a General Algebraic Modeling System that solves an objective function subject to technical and operational constraints. Modeling work to date developed for the system shown in Figure 1 is a Linear optimization that outputs a time series of dispatched power sources and defines variable capacities for component sizing subject to the constraints listed in Table 1:
