Publications

Energy Resource Planning for Puerto Rico's Future Electrical System

Newlun, Cody J.; Currie, Frank M.; O'Neill-Carrillo, Efrain O.; Bezares, Erick A.; Byrne, Raymond H.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria damaged a large portion of the Puerto Rico (PR) electrical infrastructure, leading to longterm outages across many regions. Therefore, transformation and re-development of the island's grid system is of high interest. A key part of this re-development is the passing of an updated renewable portfolio standard (RPS), originally enacted in 2010, which states that by 2050 the energy needs in PR will be met entirely by renewable resources. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of renewable generation and energy storage necessary to meet these energy goals. An increase in renewable generation within any system poses several difficulties such as meeting night-time demand and handling the operation of the existing thermal fleet. A mixed-integer linear program optimization is formulated to identify the required investments in photovoltaic solar and energy storage to meet the RPS and to minimize the investment and operational costs. Within this RPS case study a sensitivity analysis is performed with different energy storage investment costs scenarios.