Opportunities for wave energy in bulk power system operations

Abstract

Wave energy resources have high, yet largely untapped potential as candidate generation technology. In this paper, we perform a data-driven analysis to characterize the impact of wave energy integration on bulk-scale power systems and market operations. Through data-driven sensitivity studies centered on an optimization-based production cost modeling formulation, our work characterizes the inflection point beyond which wave integration starts impacting power system operations, considering present day transmission infrastructure. Furthermore, our analysis also considers the joint effects of wave energy integration and system-wide transmission expansion. Finally, potential resilience scenarios such as wildfire-driven transmission contingencies and heat wave events are investigated, whereby the contributions of grid-integrated wave energy in alleviating the effects of the resilience events are analyzed. As our demonstration test bed, we consider a reduced-order network topology for the U.S. Western Interconnection with wave energy generation integrated at carefully selected sites across the coastal areas of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. Our results indicate that over a representative year of operations, wave energy integration systematically reduces locational marginal prices (LMPs) of energy and price volatility, especially during periods of high wave resource availability (winter months for the U.S. west coast). Average, maximum, and minimum of hourly LMPs over a typical year of operation was reduced by 2.95, 51.28, and 1.13 $/MWh respectively (over a baseline scenario with no wave energy integration), when the selected network model had a total of 5000 MW wave power installed capacity during the representative year of study. The effects of wave energy integration can remain localized with existing transmission infrastructure (identified to be most pronounced in the Pacific Northwest region in the example we studied). However, with concurrent transmission expansion, the impacts of wave energy integration are likely to have a higher geographical spread. Our results also indicate that wave energy may be able to assist power system operations during resilience events such as major transmission contingencies and heat wave events, although such benefits might be dependent on factors such as proximity of affected area to wave resources, availability of adequate resource potential and adequate transmission capacity.