Integration of renewable energy into Nigerian power systems

Many countries are advancing down the road of electricity privatization, deregulation, and competition as a solution to their growing electricity demand and other challenges posed by the monopolistic nature of the existing structure. Presently, Nigeria has a supply deficit of electricity as a result of the growing demand. This imbalance has negatively affected the economy of the country and the social-economic well-being of the population. Hence, there is an urgent need to reform the power sector for greater efficiency and better performance. The objectives of the reform are to meet the growing power demand by increasing the electric power generation and also by increasing competitiveness through the participation of more private sector entities. The renewable energy integration is one way of increasing the electricity generation in the country in order to cater for the growing demand adequately. Examples of the renewable energy that is available in the country include wind, geothermal, solar and hydro. They are considered to be environmentally friendly, replenishable and do not contribute to the climate change phenomena. The country presently generates the bulk of its electricity from both thermal (85%) and hydroelectric (15%) power plants. While electricity generation from the thermal power stations constitutes the largest share of greenhouse emission, this is mostly from burning coal and natural gas. The effect of this high proportion of greenhouse emission causes climate change which is referred to as a variation in the climate system statistical properties over a long period of time. It has been observed that many of the activities of human beings are contributory factors to the release of these greenhouse gases (GHG). But, as the traditional sources of energy continue to threaten the present and future existence on the planet earth, it is, therefore, imperative to increase the integration of the variable renewable energy sources in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner over a long period of time. The variability and the uncertainties of the renewable energy source's output, present a major challenge in the design of an efficient electricity market in a deregulated environment. The system deregulation and the use of renewable sources for the generation of electricity are major changes presently being experienced in power system. In a deregulated power system, the integration of renewable generation and its penetration affects both the physical and the economic operations. The main focus of this research is on the integration of wind energy into Nigerian power systems. Up till now, research on the availability of the wind energy and its economic impacts has been limited in Nigeria. Generally, the previous study of wind energy availability in Nigeria has been limited in scope. The wind energy assessment study has not been detailed enough to be able to ascertain the wind energy potential of the country. To cope with this shortcoming, a detailed statistical wind modeling and forecasting methodology have been used in this thesis to determine the amount of extractable wind energy in six selected locations in Nigeria using historical wind speed data for 30 years. The accuracy test of the statistical models was also carried using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Chi-Square methods to determine the inherent error margin in the modeling and analysis. It is found that the error margin of the evaluations falls within the expected permissible tolerance range. For a more detailed wind assessment study of the Nigeria weather, the seasonal variation of the weather conditions as it affects the wind speed and availability during the two major seasons of dry and rainy was considered. A Self-Adaptive Differential Evolution (SADE) was used to solve the economic load dispatch problem that considers the valve-point effects and the transmission losses subject to many constraints. The results obtained were compared with those obtained using the "standard" Differential Evolution (DE), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and traditional Gradient Descent method. The results of the SADE obtained when compared with the GA, DE, and Gradient descent show the superiority of SADE over all the other methods. The research work shows that the wind energy is available in commercial quantity for generation of electricity in Nigeria. And, if tapped would help reduce the gap between the demand and supply of electricity in the country. It was also demonstrated that the wind energy integration into the power systems affects the generators total production cost

Hybrid harmony search algorithm for continuous optimization problems

Harmony Search (HS) algorithm has been extensively adopted in the literature to address optimization problems in many different fields, such as industrial design, civil engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering problems. In order to ensure its search performance, HS requires extensive tuning of its four parameters control namely harmony memory size (HMS), harmony memory consideration rate (HMCR), pitch adjustment rate (PAR), and bandwidth (BW). However, tuning process is often cumbersome and is problem dependent. Furthermore, there is no one size fits all problems. Additionally, despite many useful works, HS and its variant still suffer from weak exploitation which can lead to poor convergence problem. Addressing these aforementioned issues, this thesis proposes to augment HS with adaptive tuning using Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). Meanwhile, to enhance its exploitation, this thesis also proposes to adopt a new variant of the opposition-based learning technique (OBL). Taken together, the proposed hybrid algorithm, called IHS-GWO, aims to address continuous optimization problems. The IHS-GWO is evaluated using two standard benchmarking sets and two real-world optimization problems. The first benchmarking set consists of 24 classical benchmark unimodal and multimodal functions whilst the second benchmark set contains 30 state-of-the-art benchmark functions from the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). The two real-world optimization problems involved the three-bar truss and spring design. Statistical analysis using Wilcoxon rank-sum and Friedman of IHS-GWO’s results with recent HS variants and other metaheuristic demonstrate superior performance

Optimization Methods Applied to Power Systems Ⅱ

Electrical power systems are complex networks that include a set of electrical components that allow distributing the electricity generated in the conventional and renewable power plants to distribution systems so it can be received by final consumers (businesses and homes). In practice, power system management requires solving different design, operation, and control problems. Bearing in mind that computers are used to solve these complex optimization problems, this book includes some recent contributions to this field that cover a large variety of problems. More specifically, the book includes contributions about topics such as controllers for the frequency response of microgrids, post-contingency overflow analysis, line overloads after line and generation contingences, power quality disturbances, earthing system touch voltages, security-constrained optimal power flow, voltage regulation planning, intermittent generation in power systems, location of partial discharge source in gas-insulated switchgear, electric vehicle charging stations, optimal power flow with photovoltaic generation, hydroelectric plant location selection, cold-thermal-electric integrated energy systems, high-efficiency resonant devices for microwave power generation, security-constrained unit commitment, and economic dispatch problems