Increasing Demand Covered by Renewable Energy in El Hierro Island

The power system of the El Hierro island comprises a wind farm, a pumped storage hydropower plant and a diesel power plant. Its operational history shows that the renewable energy participation in the energy mix is approximately 50%. In order to increase this participation, the installation of residential photovoltaic generation and battery storage has been considered. In this paper, the operation of the whole system is analyzed by simulation. Simulations consider historical data of electric supply and demand in addition to meteorological data to obtain the wind and solar power production. The simulation tool has been tuned to successfully reproduce past system performance. From the simulations, the effect of adding new renewable generation and storage has been assessed. Also, the effect of a different operation strategy has been analyzed. From the results of these simulations, adding batteries has a negligible effect in increasing renewable energy participation. By contrast, adding solar power provides an increase in renewable energy participation. However, eliminating the requirement of 50% of synchronous generation has the largest effect on increasing renewable energy participation in the energy mix.