Load Following Capability for Hybrid Nuclear and Solar Photovoltaic Power Plants with an Energy Storage System

Motivated by the future of clean energy sources and storage systems, the purpose of this research is to evaluate the ability to combine nuclear and solar photovoltaic generation systems as well as an energy storage system in order to meet the demand of an electric power system load. While nuclear power generation has been around for decades, renewable energy is becoming more popular as technologies begin to become more affordable. In addition, energy storage is still the most expensive component of this equation. A case study was conducted by using an example load pattern for various time periods in a year that is gathered from a North Carolina electric utility. A scalable nuclear power source (such as NuScale) was assumed to supply a constant and continuous power level. A range for solar farm size was selected, and the solar output was calculated by gathering the solar irradiance data from Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The energy storage system capacity for a select nuclear and solar farm size was later determined. These calculations were executed in a MATLAB environment. By comparing energy storage system capacities for a range of nuclear and solar farm sizes, one can determine that renewable resources alone, will not be able to provide enough flexibility to meet the demand of large-scale loads. Our calculations specifically showed that solar PV operation alone results in 9560 MWh energy storage capacity. However, an optimized solar PV and nuclear hybrid generation scheme reduced the energy capacity requirement significantly (by approximately a factor of 13). Utilities are using energy storage systems comprised of batteries like lithium-ion due to their ideal and decreasing price range. Optimizing the size of generation plants and reducing the battery capacity eases the economic impact of variable load demands.