PNNL

Abstract

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 in the western coast of continental United States (U.S.). A suitable reduced-order network topology for the U.S.Western Interconnection was curated, to which wave energy generation was integrated at carefully selected sites across the coastal areas of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. This model is subsequently utilized to run economic dispatch scenarios under different amounts of wave energy penetration. 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 in winter months. The effect is identified to be most pronounced in the Pacific Northwest region (states of Washington, Oregon, and parts of northern California). With concurrent transmission expansion, the impacts of wave energy integration were observed to percolate to more inland states as well as southern California with greater effectiveness. We also study the impact of wave energy under a resilience-driven scenario whereby the system is assumed to have a week-long transmission outage in one of the major transmission corridors between northern California and Oregon. Our results indicate the potential ability of wave energy to reduce possible loss of load scenarios and alleviate congestion issues in such resilience scenarios, especially in nodes directly impacted by the line contingencies. Lastly, we investigated the impact of wave energy integration during the August 2020 California heat wave event. Our results indicate that wave power could have enabled the reduction of LMPs and curb unserved load in Northern California, although the benefit is marginal due to comparatively weaker resource (wave) availability in summer and the high-impacted areas being relatively farther away from the considered wave generation sites.