Data-Driven Reliability Assessment for Marine Renewable Energy Enabled Island Power Systems

Reliable grid operations in coastal/island power systems depend heavily on the diversity of onsite generation resources and robustness of energy delivery medium from the mainland grid. Analyzing and quantifying operational risks for such island power systems with diverse non-conventional generation portfolios through conventional techniques can prove to be cumbersome, often requiring multiple different system-specific inputs. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel, purely data-driven formulation to quantify the operational risks associated with the power system, through minimal input data, i.e., historical load and generation time series. Subsequently, we use our proposed formulation to evaluate the effectiveness of marine renewable energy (MRE) resources, which are perceived as more persistent and predictable renewable resources (compared to wind and solar), in providing reliability benefits to island power systems. The proposed formulation is demonstrated with a case study for an island power system in Nantucket, MA.