High Temperature Superconducting Devices and Renewable Energy Resources in Future Power Grids: A Case Study

Recent developments in high temperature superconducting (HTS) materials have made superconducting cables and energy storage systems promising alternatives for use in future power systems. High temperature superconducting coils based superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) can be integrated to other commercially available battery systems to form a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) to mitigate the potential issues caused by a large-scale penetration of distributed generation, such as the midday voltage rise, the reverse power flow, and the voltage unbalance in the distribution system. The rapid response of the HTS SMES system in the HESS can be used to mitigate the high ramp rate of the photovoltaic (PV) output fluctuation during passing cloud events. This paper has performed a case study for a future low loss distribution grid with a high penetration of renewable energy (RE), such as solar PV, fitted with superconducting cables or superconducting power lines, where issues associated with the large-scale penetration of the RE can be mitigated.