Impact of High Renewable Penetration on the Power System Operation Mode: A Data-Driven Approach

The high penetration of renewable energy will substantially change the power system operation. Traditionally, the annual operation of a power system can be represented by some typical operation modes and acts as the basis for the power-system-related analysis. The introduction of highly penetrated renewable energy will make the power system operation mode highly diversified and variable. These modes may not follow traditional empirical patterns. In this paper, we propose a data-driven method based on high-dimensional power system operation data (including power flow, unit generation, and load demand) to identify the pattern of the operation modes and analyze the impact of high renewable penetration. Specifically, the proposed data-driven method is composed of simulation, preprocessing, clustering, dimension reduction, and visualization with the aim to provide an intuitive understanding of the operation mode variety under high renewable penetration. In addition, several indices are introduced to quantify the space dispersion, time variation, and seasonal consistency of operation modes. A case study on actual Qinghai provincial power system in China validates the effectiveness of the proposed data-driven method and indicates that the dispersion and time variation of operation mode will significantly increase in the beginning and then saturate with the increase in renewable penetration level. The operation mode is also less correlated with seasons in renewable energy dominated power system.