Forecasting the impact of increasing integration of renewable sources in the power unbalance during peak and off-peak hours

Abstract

Environmental  impacts  and  external  dependency  due  to  energy  consumption  can  be  minimized  with  integration  of  renewable  power  sources.  Portugal,  as  well  as  a  number  of  other  countries,  presents  a  sharp  increase  in  renewable  sources  integra-tion,  namely  in  wind,  solar  photovoltaic,  waves,  biomass  and  small hydro. As  all  renewable  technologies  ultimately  derive  energy  from  natural  sources  that  vary  in  their  availability  over  different  time-scales,  the  integration  of  larger  amounts  of  renewable  sources  is  becoming  an  increasingly  important  issue  for  the  needed  balance  of power generation and demand. The  main  objectives  of  this  paper  are  the  settlement  of  a  forecast  methodology to quantify power generation and demand unbalance and  characterize  that  sort  of  unbalance,  specially  focusing  on  the  difference between peak and off-peak periods. Heeding  the  distinction  between  peak  and  off-peak  hours,  the  results obtained show that the unbalance behaviour is particularly distinct in these periods, namely with generation shortage in peak hours and excess of generation in off-peak hours.