Forecasting solar PV market impact in Alberta

Abstract

Albert has Canada’s 3rdlargest electricity system, and the largest coal fleet. This work examines some of the market challenges solar may face as it grows in the province. In fact, Alberta’s only commercial scale solar system was committed in 2018.In this thesis there won’t be analyzed all the different renewable energies but solar power plants and how it affects the massive introduction of powerprovidedbysolar generationinto the electricity market of Alberta. To do so, itis previously needed to forecast the solar radiation in the province and try to determinethe total amount of energy that could be produced by a solar plant in a specific location. This is not an easy job due to solar data from the different sources vary quite a lot, so to adjust the data to possible future production in different locations itis need to take some assumptions, such as data from different years, different data providers and different range of losses.After evaluating differentdata source, PVWattsis selected as the best one toobtainthe solar radiation an due to this fact the electrical energy produced for a possiblefuture power plant in Alberta. Following the steps described in the methodology section the new prices in the electricity market is found for a different scenarios for different years of analysis. Moreover, all the information about the CO2emissions iscollected in order to determine how much emissions are avoided due to the solar power generation in the electricity mix and how this emissions per megawatt hour produced are also reduced with this solar penetration in the electricity market.Finally an investigation about which kind of power plants are kick out of the electricity pool price market because of new solar power plants and how many megawatts of each of them are out of the pool to determine if the most polluting centrals are the ones going out of the pool or not