Impact of photovoltaic power sources on a power system's capacity reliability levels

Energy limitations associated with unconventional energy sources e.g., photovoltaic and wind power) can play an important role in capacity adequacy evaluation of present and future electric system configurations. Solar photovoltaic power plants are electric power sources whose output depends on natural factors that are statistically interdependent of the load. Photovoltaic (PV) plants have the significant problematic characteristic that their power outputs are not dispatchable into a power grid by the system operators. Utility dispatchers have virtually no control in regard to the amount of power available from photovoltaic plants at any instant.. This paper presents a new methodology for assessing the reliability of utility and industrial generation systems that include PV plants. The proposed new models are energy based and use a load modification approach (Chowdhury, 1990; Palz, 1978; Jaffe, 1985) for assessing the impacts of photovoltaic electric power plants upon a utility supply system. The method and the models for PV power plant output modeling are illustrated with a simple system example. The methodology is directly applicable to utility and industrial operating system configurations