Kuwait Renewable Energy Grid Operator's Display

The Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) has funded a three-year project with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to develop the Kuwait Renewable Energy Prediction System (KREPS) for the wind and photovoltaic (PV) solar farms at the Shagaya Renewable Energy Park. A functional and interactive web-based display for grid operators was created to plot the forecasting data from KREPS for global horizontal irradiance (GHI), wind speed, PV power, and wind power. The total power from both PV and wind and Shagaya is also displayed. The display streamlines being able to view the latest forecasts available that are issued every 15 minutes, in addition to comparing recent forecasts to real-time observations at Shagaya.

The graphs featured in the display are interactive (point-precision read-outs of time series data on mouse-overs, zoom-in/zoom-out capability, and toggling series data). The Analog Ensemble technique is used as a post-processing step to generate probabilistic forecast percentiles that are shown to the user in the display. These features allow grid operators to see the power output forecast at any lead time out to eight days, and provides useful information to operators about the uncertainty in the power forecast at a given time, thus enabling better scheduling of reserves. The display, which has been iteratively developed with regular feedback from both KISR and the grid operators at Kuwait’s National Control Center to maximize its utility to end users, also features historical capabilities to select a prior date/time to see forecasts valid at that issue time and the corresponding observations.

A demonstration of this display will showcase the aforementioned features in addition to some of the tools and technologies that enable the display. A sample screenshot of the KREPS grid operator display for a wind forecast is shown in the figure attached.