Analysis of Economic-Technical Potential of Renewable Power Sources for the Establishment of National Renewable Energy Center in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam

Abstract

Currently, Vietnam's energy source structure is being changed by which renewable energy sources play more important role to meet the electricity demand and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil energy sources. Vietnam's energy development strategy determines to build some renewable energy centers, of which Ninh Thuan is the first province designated to become a national renewable energy center. This is based on Ninh Thuan's endowment as a province having the largest renewable energy potential in Vietnam. Development of a large renewable energy center allows power system planners to overcome the mismatch in timescales associated with developing transmission power grid and renewable energy generation. Besides, renewable energy center can facilitate a significant pipeline of large-scale renewable energy and storage projects. However, Ninh Thuan province is far away from the major load centers of Vietnam so the calculation and analysis of economic indicators need to be studied. This paper will present the results of the analysis of economic indicators of major renewable electricity sources in Ninh Thuan (onshore wind power, offshore wind power, solar power) to provide scientific arguments for developing a renewable energy center in Vietnam. Also the paper addresses the problem of the large-scale penetration of renewable energy into the power system of Vietnam. The proposed approach presents the optimization of operational decisions in different power generation technologies as a Markov decision process. It uses a stochastic base model that optimizes a deterministic lookahead model. The first model applies the stochastic search to optimize the operation of power sources. The second model captures hourly variations of renewable energy over a year. The approach helps to find the optimal generation configuration under different market conditions.