INTEGRATION OF WIND AND HYDROPOWER GENERATION IN SELECTED SMALL ISOLATED ISLAND POWER GRID SYSTEM IN THE PHILIPPINES

Abstract

The Philippine Archipelago in the Southeast Asia, due to its geography, has problems of linking its entire islands into one power grid. Some isolated and small islands have autonomous small power grid system in their locality, which are interconnected by power transmission from city to other nearby municipalities. About a hundred of these power generating plants depends on diesel or bunker oil C as its fuel. Although the diesel power plants have low front capital cost for new installation and provides steady power as base load plants, it however has several economic and environmental disadvantages such as unstable operating fuel and maintenance oil costs due to effect of volatility of crude oil price in the world market and the greenhouse gases (GHG) such as CO2 that the fuel combustion emits. Consumer electricity prices in these islands are highly subsidized by the consumers in the main island of Luzon and the current operations are incurring losses due also to operational inefficiency of some of these old fossil fuel fired generators. Some of these isolated island grids have sustainable alternative renewable energy resources that can provide substantial contribution to power generation in the island to meet its annually increasing electricity demand. This dissertation studies the potential application and integration of wind and hydro power system (WHPS) to selected small power grid system in Mindoro and Palawan Islands. Techno-economic analysis of the proposed system was performed using HOMER software to find the optimum size of each part of the wind and hydro power system such as the nominal power of the wind turbines, the hydropower contributions, remaining contribution of the grid, excess combined renewable energy production that can be utilized as deferrable load to pump water to higher reservoir and the amount of greenhouse gas (CO2) reduced by the proposed system. The study concludes that the proposed grid-integrated wind and hydro power system with deferrable load can contribute substantially to the present power system and is most likely to be cost effective and very attractive investment project for small isolated islands in the Philippines.