Flexibility Analysis of O&G Platform Power System with Wind Energy Integration

Abstract

Many researchers and operators are assessing the impact of wind energy integration into the gas turbines based conventional power system due to the intermittent and variable nature. The flexibility characteristics of the gas turbines are vital to guarantee adequate performance at different levels of wind energy penetration to meet the demand of the O&G platform. This study aims to verify the impact of increasing flexibility of the offshore O&G platform’s power system. Therefore, the conventional O&G platform power system is modelled and compared with the post-flexibilization or state-of-the-art power system at different dynamic restrictions of the Open-Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGT) like ramp rates, minimum loading, uptime and downtime, and start-up/shut-down costs. Subsequently, the conventional and state-of-the-art power system model are then simulated at different levels of wind energy penetration, to analyze the system response of the O&G platform, as the intermittent wind energy can generate critical power system instability and imbalance. The proposed model has 4 OCGTs of 33.3MW (locally installed at the O&G platform) and 4 offshore floating wind turbines of 15MW that is satisfying 2 different load profiles of O&G platform (68MW and 34MW average load). The simulation results highlighted that the state-of-the-art power system accommodated higher shares of wind energy as compared to the conventional power system due to the flexible constraints. Also, the flexible power system achieved higher levels of fuel saving, when simulated for 100 hours. The same case study was considered for 25 years and the hours of fuel saving at 5% was 1733 hours and 20% of wind penetration resulted in 1857 hours of fuel saving. The study was performed in the modified Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), a python based free simulation toolbox for optimizing the power dispatch.