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Close to 50 percent of the Samoa’s electricity supply is produced by renewable sources. As more renewable generation comes online, the ability of the grid to handle the intermittent generation from various energy sources is fundamental to ensuring stable and reliable electricity supply for this Island Nation.
Electric Power Corporation (EPC, Samoa''s sole electricity utility) is mandated under the Government of Samoa to achieve a 70% renewable electricity grid by the year 2031. To help achieve this goal, EPC are seeking to review their electricity network to ensure it can deliver improved security of supply through increased resilience of the grid to accommodate embedded renewable energy generation.
A full technical feasibility study is needed to assess the fundamental supporting systems needed to enable an increasingly renewable grid while ensuring grid stability, including:
The project will start with an inception call between the consultant, GGGI, and the Electric Power Corporation (EPC, Samoa''s National Utility). On the call, the scope and objectives of the assignment will be discussed, and EPC will give a preliminary overview of the grid stability challenges being faced.
The consultant shall then gather and review relevant data and information. This will include historical data on grid performance, load patterns, voltage fluctuations, and frequency variations as well as reviewing previous related studies such as:
Based on the review of previous studies and historical data, the consultant shall identify gaps in the information needed to conduct the technical assessment, and the approach planned to obtain that information or develop assumptions.
Deliverable 1: Inception report with confirmation of objectives and workplan and summary of desktop review and gaps.
The consultant shall conduct a full technical feasibility study to assess the fundamental support systems needed to enable an increasingly renewable grid. The technical assessment should provide a clear understanding of the current state, identify gaps, and propose well-defined practical and technical solution(s) that enhance the grid’s stability and reliability.
The consultant shall conduct the technical assessments based on PowerFactory modeling and simulations, or equivalent. This will involve load flow, contingency, and fault analysis of the grid for the proposed/future operation scenarios and grid elements – with distributed batteries and upgraded SCADA systems and analysing how these measures would respond to grid disturbances, load changes, and renewable energy integration.
This project is expected to be completed by 31 January 2023. The assignment duration is 4 months with a tentative timetable shown below. The deliverables will be reviewed by GGGI who will provide comments within 1 week to be addressed by the consultant.
The Consultant''s work progress shall be monitored primarily through periodic review meetings, the precise schedule of which is to be determined based on consultation with the Consultant. The Consultant is also expected to periodically produce, upon GGGI''s request, a formal progress report that includes: an overview of the project, a narrative description of project activities, detailed information on project objectives and milestones, actual achievements made against the timeline set, etc.
The consultancy team should have appropriate experience and expertise in the energy sector and in the Pacific. Specifically, the firm should have:
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With a new automated software system to manage the grid, the island nation is ending the blackouts that were marring its transition to clean energy.
Whenever wind and solar power supply more than 20% of a grid''s peak demand, the unpredictability of those sources can make the grid unstable. In Samoa, in the worst cases, it led to power outages. In the best cases, it meant the island was still relying on diesel power more than it wanted to.
Tesla installed two of its "Powerpack" battery systems, and also developed and implemented island grid controller software that can control both the batteries and all of the power plants. "If a big cloud comes over the island and the solar drops very quickly, we can control the battery to make up the difference so we don''t have to start a generator immediately, and we don''t have to keep a generator running even when it might not be needed," says Straubel.
It''s something that a human can''t do easily, even if someone was continuously monitoring the grid. "You have to respond in fractions of a second and you have to be kind of watching a lot of different data sources at the same time and then responding quickly," he says. "So it''s sort of the perfect application for a computer to do exactly that."
[Image: Tesla]
Since the batteries were installed earlier in the summer, the island is no longer having outages, and the electricity supply is steady. The local utility has been able to reduce the use of diesel generators, though it''s now working to tweak the system to use even less diesel. "Stability has been achieved, but we''re still working on least cost of operation," says Fonoti Perelini S. Perelini, the project manager for the utility. "We''d like now to reduce the use of diesel generators right up to no diesel, and we''d like to move away from using diesel at certain times when there''s a lot of renewable available." Diesel use will drop both as the utility continues to add new renewable sources and as it works to optimize the grid controller.
The grid controller system, which can be customized for any grid, is something that could also make sense in large grids that already use software, since major grids tend to rely on multiple systems and some human control, and Tesla''s software integrates everything and adds autonomy. The need for it may increase as more grids move to wind and solar power. "We''re going to see a lot more of the problems Samoa was struggling with coming up because they were getting to such high renewable percentages," says Straubel. "So it''s really an indicator of the future. These are the types of problems and systems that we will definitely see in more parts of the world and in bigger and bigger grids."
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