Renewable Energy Island Research Articles

Implementation of energy management in hybrid renewable energy island systems using soft computing techniques

Implementation of energy management in hybrid renewable energy island systems using soft computing techniques

Implementation of energy management in hybrid renewable energy island systems using soft computing techniques

Microgrid-based energy management system (EMS) is designed and implemented in this paper to manage the energy balance between renewable resources and the load, i.e., supply-demand balance of energy. Wind energy generation is done through PMSG using the method of vector control of synchronous generator. Further, the investigation of modelling and control of state of charge (SOC)-based battery management system (BMS) in microgrid for autonomous/islanding mode is presented in the form of aggregated battery model. Since BMS is critical in maintaining the optimum performance of battery and hence, a battery system has been designed in the present work. The results of the comparative study of the proposed MPPT techniques, i.e., CSA, ANN, FLC with conventional P&O using MATLAB/SIMULINK in terms of accuracy, electric power efficiency, duty cycle, DC link voltages, and load power of proposed techniques are presented in the present work. The working of the proposed EMS for hybrid PV-wind-battery system is verified through simulation results using various control algorithms.

Entrepreneurial resource construction through collective bricolage on Denmark’s renewable energy Island: an ethnographic study

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurial resource construction through bricolage is an underappreciated element in a growing body of entrepreneurship and organization studies examining bricolage as an organizational strategy under conditions of resource scarcity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data, this study of the Danish island Samsø’s successful transition to renewable energy argues for a richer understanding and a more positive appraisal of entrepreneurial bricolage as a multifaceted strategy for change on the community level. By demonstrating the constructed nature of the resource environments identified on Samsø, the article argues that bricolage, rather than revolving around the combination of already available resources to create new entrepreneurial ventures, is a process involving the construction of resources to achieve change. An in-depth understanding of this process of resource construction is especially relevant in the context of local sustainable energy transitions, as bricolage, in this context, can enable the community to work towards a shared goal without accepting the constraints of the resource-scarce local environment.

Water cycle driven only by wind energy surplus: Towards 100% renewable energy islands

This paper studies how to increase the share of renewable energy by using solely stand-alone renewable energies to drive the water cycle. A case study is undertaken of El Hierro (Canary Islands, Spain), an island already on the path to becoming a 100% renewable energy island thanks principally to a wind-hydro power plant that covered around 60% of the annual electricity demand in 2018. The island's water cycle includes groundwater extraction, seawater desalination and water pumping and distribution, representing altogether around 35% of the annual electricity demand of the island. The idea is to investigate the possibility of driving the entire water cycle solely with the wind energy surplus. For this purpose, two scenarios are considered and developed: one based on the existing decentralised water cycle, and the second on an alternative centralised one, with just one modular reverse osmosis desalination plant and a centralised water storage system. The aim is to establish which model adapts best to an intermittent energy source such as wind energy without conventional backup systems. Results show that both scenarios lead to an increase in the overall renewable energy contribution in the island. Moreover, the centralised water model, specially due to its centralised water storage system, allows a higher contribution from renewable energy sources, increasing their overall annual penetration.

Steady-state Operation Area of VSC-HVDC Converter Station Connecting Renewable Energy Cluster by Isolated Network

When the large-scale renewable power island is connected to VSC-HVDC transmission system, we should figure out the steady-state operation area of VSC-HVDC converter station. Based on the equivalent model of renewable energy island, the constraints of VSC-HVDC converter station are analyzed, and a fast method for calculating steady-state operation area of converter station is presented in this paper. The influence of equivalent line impedance of renewable energy island, transformer ratio of converter station and voltage setting value of grid-connected point on steady-state operation area of converter station is analyzed. And the three-dimensional view of the steady-state operation area of the converter station under different grid-connected voltage is depicted.

Optimal planning of a 100% renewable energy island supply system based on the integration of a concentrating solar power plant and desalination units

Environmental-unfriendly power supply mode and freshwater shortage are two main problems for isolated islands. A 100% renewable energy supply system equipped with local desalination units is an effective solution to the above problems. It can save fuel supplies and eliminate pollutant emissions. Firstly, a 100% renewable energy supply system based on wind turbines and the integration of a concentrating solar power (CSP) plant and desalination units is proposed in this paper. The flexible schedulability of CSP plants is utilized to complement to wind power generation, and the thermal storage system reduces the battery energy storage configuration for islands. Different from the conventional method of seeking the minimum levelized cost of CSP from limited capacity combinations, an optimal planning model is established to achieve the minimum overall costs of the 100% renewable energy system. In addition, the adjustable output characteristic of CSP is also considered as the decision variables to optimize the operation of the microgrid. The model is linearized to a mixed integer linear programming problem. Simulation results show that the proposed supply system improves the efficiency of renewable energy utilization and capacity factors of generation units; the peak load demand is cut down and the capacity configuration of generation units is also reduced. The comparison with other state-of-art systems shows that the cost-effectiveness of the proposed system is better in areas with abundant renewable energy resources and high fuel costs.

Think Piece: Reflections on the Individual–Collective Relation in Change Agency Formation in the Samsø Renewable Energy Island Project

This paper offers reflections on change agency formation in the Renewable Energy Island (REI) project on Samso, following a field visit to the island in June 2016. Both individual and collective agency are set out as central for the processes leading to the change in the REI project, spurring reflections on individual–collective agency dimensions in change agency formation related to climate change issues, inspired by notions of participation in everyday life (Marres, 2011; Micheletti 2002, 2006). The paper furthermore focuses on an exploration of two different formats of knowledge-sharing in the learning processes leading to change on Samso – ‘neighbourly visits’ and web-based documentation – emphasising the role of knowledge in change agency formation. Drawing on Jamison’s (2001, 2010) notion of the making of green knowledge in the tension between environmental politics and cultural transformation, the paper suggests that the REI project can be characterised by both an adaptive approach and by social resilience development.

Storifying Samsø’s Renewable Energy Transition

ABSTRACTThrough a joint community effort Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island Samsø became self-sufficient with renewable energy over a period of 10 years from 1997 to 2007. Today, the story about Samsø’s successful energy transition has become a global export and a widely known model of community building, public participation and shared ownership in renewable energy technologies and transition processes. What has allowed the Samsø narrative to travel so widely has been the effective ‘transition story’ created about the islanders’ efforts. This transition story, however, has become fixed with the years and has assumed an ideal-typical character. Meanwhile, the challenges and costs inherent in the complicated socio-material process of transition are underestimated and largely forgotten. While such transition stories are indeed inspiring, the ideal-typical narrative may stand in the way of the development of further local energy transitions, as challenging elements of the process are downplayed to strengthen the narrative power of the story. Ethnographic stories about Samsø complicate the island’s transition narrative and add nuance to the Samsø story, highlighting its discrepancies and problematizing the effects of such well-crafted transition narratives. This tendency toward the ‘storification’ of transition processes is not restricted to Samsø; it is employed as a tactics by environmental organizations operating globally.

Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island

The Danish island Samsø is world-famous as Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island. 21 wind turbines supply the island’s electricity. Today, public hostility toward a projected nearshore wind farm off the island’s preserved northern coast is growing. This paper takes its main theoretical cue from Gomart and Hajer’s (2003) call to open up political questions to empirical inquiry and to pay attention to the material settings in which political questions unfold. The paper seeks to make sense of the islanders’ unexpected opposition to a new wind farm, and it does so through a critique of the unexperimental and depoliticizing attitude – found in the empirical case as well as in some academic scholarship – of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) logic. Replacing the NIMBY logic of closing down deliberation with an empirical and ‘cosmopolitical’ (Stengers, 2005) approach to open up the space of politics to close investigation, the paper focuses on the empirical settings which give the controversy its specific shape and asks how the projected wind farm is interrogated, negotiated and recast as it travels through the socio-material politics of the wind controversy.

Authoring Participation

Samsø, Denmark's Renewable Energy Island since 1997, is world renowned for being self-sufficient in renewable energy and for having achieved energy self-sufficiency and CO2 neutrality through successful processes of public participation. In this article I seek to show how these processes of public participation so central to the Renewable Energy Island project can be better understood as instances of material participation motivated first and foremost by a concern for the future of the island as a 'liveable' community; a community in which jobs and institutions are not constantly threatening to disappear. By turning to material participation, a concept inspired by Noortje Marres and Jennifer Gabrys, the efforts put into Samsø’s energy transformation by the islanders are given specificity. While much literature on public participation foregrounds public meetings and other spaces for deliberation and debate, material participation locates participation in everyday practice and work. On Samsø, the islanders’ participation was not an add-on to the project, it was an indispensable resource in itself. Building on extensive fieldwork I analyse how the islanders came to invest their time and resources in the Renewable Energy Island project, highlighting how, by materializing energy in concrete, local projects, energy and climate change-related projects can gain community-strengthening potentialities reaching beyond goals of energy self-sufficiency.

Management through hope: an ethnography of Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyse the process of social and technical change that took place between 1997 and 2007 through which Samsø, a rural island of 4,000 inhabitants, became Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island (REI).Design/methodology/approach– Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Samsø in 2013 and 2014, the paper takes as its starting point a citizens’ meeting in which a new renewable energy project is proposed by a municipal coordinator. This meeting, in which the municipal coordinator exhibits a “change management” attitude, fails to win the citizens’ support and becomes an entry point into an investigation of how the REI project developers managed to get the island community to actively support the project. A gateway to the past, the meeting allows the author to ethnographically describe the unobserved events of 1997-2007.Findings– The argument is that the REI project developers practised management through hope or “hope management”, in contrast to “change management”, creating a project that succeeded in accomplishing its goals of changing the island due to its openness, its rootedness in the island community’s past, and the project developers’ ability to speak to a down-to-earth variety of hope.Originality/value– The paper makes use of an ethnographic study of the present to investigate an unobserved past in which a REI was built. Taking up the “hope debate” in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (Stengers, 2002; Miyazaki, 2004; Jensen, 2014), the paper contributes with an empirical analysis of the role of hope in the management of change processes.

Wave resource in El Hierro—an island towards energy self-sufficiency

The island of El Hierro (Spain), a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in the Atlantic Ocean, aims to become the first 100% renewable energy island in the world. With a €54 million wind project already under way, the present research looks at the island’s wave resource using a 44-year hindcast dataset obtained through numerical modelling. The geographical distribution of wave energy is examined on the basis of eight study sites around the island. A substantial resource is found west and north of El Hierro, with average wave power in the order of 25 kW m −1 and total annual energy in excess 200 MW h m −1; the resource is less abundant east and south of the island. In addition to these geographical variations, wave energy in El Hierro presents seasonal variations, with energetic winters and mild summers. After analysing the total resource and its spatial and seasonal variations, its composition in terms of sea states (significant wave heights and energy periods) is examined, and how this composition affects the selection of the Wave Energy Converters to be installed is discussed.