Impacts of COVID-19 on Kuwait’s electric power grid

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2021.107025Get rights and content
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Abstract

In response to a request from Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water, a resource adequacy model was developed to assess Kuwait’s ability to supply sufficient energy to meet the load demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Power system operators and utilities use this type of model to ascertain their ability to meet demand, most notably peak demand. The model includes active power loss as well as the loss of resource capacity under medium and large contingencies. As resource adequacy models do not take into account security constraints such as transmission limits and voltage, they cannot be used for operations. However, due to their simplicity, they are appropriate for studying a wide range of scenarios for formulating policy decisions. Resource adequacy analysis can provide valuable insights into the performance of a system under urgent conditions such as the one posed by COVID-19 and similar unforeseen disruptions. This model utilizes an analysis of historical load data to forecast the 2020 peak load and develop a number of scenarios to test the capacity margin of Kuwait’s power system. The scenarios vary based upon load growth (2–25 %) and whether there is an outage or unavailable generation (no outage, 720 MW outage, 1440 MW, and 2400 MW outage).

Keywords

Power system simulation
Power system modeling
Resource adequacy model
Contingency analysis
COVID-19

Cited by (0)

Yousef M. Al-Abdullah received a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ in 2007, a Master’s of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA in 2009, and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ in 2016. He has been an Associate Research Scientist with the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research since 2016.

Mahdi Al-Saffar, a Research Associate at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, received a Bachelor’s of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and a Master’s of Science in Energy Management from the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is currently a Doctoral student of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah.

Ahmad Al-Azmi is an engineer at the Ministry of Electricity and Water of the State of Kuwait.

Mostafa Sahraei-Ardakani received a Doctorate of Philosophy degree in Energy Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA in 2013. He received a Bachelor’s of Science and Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.