Renewable sources impact on power system reliability and nuclear safety

The introduction of the renewable energy sources in power system result in multiple and complex challenges considering continuous and reliable operation of the power grid. One of the main challenges is intermittent power production from some renewable power sources requiring compensation of the power by the remaining power plants in the given system. This paper presents the results of the analysis of a power system generation availability considering introduction of wind generating power units. The power system reliability is assessed by the Loss of load probability evaluated from the cumulative outage probability table. The analysis considers the uncertainty of the available power from the wind genera-tors and uncertainty of the peak load in the analyzed system. Weibull distribution is used for the characterization of the wind speed in the developed method. The consequences of the substitution of the nuclear power plants with the wind generators on the safety of the remaining operating nuclear power plants are analyzed. The core damage frequency obtained from the probabilistic safety assessment model of the nuclear power plant is used to evaluate the safety of the nuclear power plants. Obtained results show that introduction of wind generating units in the power system results in increase of the Loss of load probability. The obtained Loss of load probability depends on uncertainty of the peak load size and shape parameters of the wind speed in the model. Increase share of wind generation in overall power system generation results in increased Loss of load probability. Substitution of the nuclear power plants with wind generation results in small decrease of the overall core damage frequency in the given system. The decrease of the overall core damage frequency depends on the characteristics of the substituted nuclear power plants and share of nuclear and wind generation in the analyzed system.