Development of the Kuwait Renewable Energy Prediction System (KREPS)

The Shagaya Renewable Energy Park in western Kuwait was commissioned to help Kuwait achieve its national goal of 15% renewable energy production by 2030. Phase 1 of Shagaya is complete, with 10 MW wind power, 10 MW photovoltaic (PV) solar power, and 50 MW concentrated solar power (CSP). Future phases will add thousands of megawatts of wind and solar power capacity to Shagaya.

Addressing the need for good forecasting in order to reliably integrate that wind and solar power into Kuwait’s national electrical grid, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in a three-year project funded by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), has built the Kuwait Renewable Energy Prediction System (KREPS).

KREPS operates on nowcasting, intra-day, and days-ahead lead times, incorporating various global numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, a specialized high-resolution configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional NWP model tailored for wind and solar applications (WRF-Solar-Wind), a specialized nowcasting version of WRF with improved cloud initialization (MAD-WRF), statistical machine learning models for nowcasting (StatCast-Wind and StatCast-Solar), and real-time meteorological and power observations from Shagaya’s wind and PV solar plants. At the heart of KREPS is NCAR’s Dynamic Integrated Forecasting (DICast®) system, which optimally blends models and observations using machine learning to generate updated wind and PV solar power forecasts every 15 minutes. Probabilistic power forecasts, including confidence intervals, are also generated using an analog ensemble (AnEn) technique. A web-based operator display, which incorporates multiple rounds of feedback from Kuwait’s grid operators, presents the final probabilistic power forecasts, overlaid with observed power when in historical mode. In this presentation we highlight results from the performance of KREPS, both over extended periods and for individual high-impact cases, including wind/solar ramp events and dust storms.