Optimising the insertion of renewables in the Colombian power sector
Registro en:
instname:Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano
reponame:Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano
Autor
Henao, Felipe
Rodriguez, Yeny
Viteri, Juan Pablo
Dyner, Isaac
Institución
Resumen
While most of Colombia's power comes from large-scale hydroelectricity generation, it still depends on
fossil-fuel-based technologies. Alternative cleaner energy sources have been largely neglected despite
their abundance and the likely complementarities between different renewable resources. This limited
mix of energy sources has made the system vulnerable to unpredictable and recurrent drought conditions
(El Ni~no) occurring every 4e5 years. In the past, El Ni~no brought high energy costs and power
supply losses. This paper proposes an optimisation model to study the insertion of renewable energy
systems (RES) into the Colombian electricity sector. The model considers a cost-based generation
competition between conventional technologies (hydro and thermal) and alternative RES (solar photovoltaic
(PV) and wind). It aims at minimising system costs, CO2 emissions, and the number of blackout
events. The model is solved by following two procedures known as Implicit Stochastic Optimisation (ISO)
and Robust Optimisation (RO), and the results indicate that alternative renewables should replace all
fossil-fuel-based technologies for economic and environmental reasons. Solar PV seems particularly
promising to expand system capacity, as it contributes to both the reduction of the overall system costs
and to the ability of the system to cope with extreme dry weather conditions.