Stability of the Jordanian electrical system in the presence of intermittent renewable resources

For many environmental and strategic reasons in the last years, Jordan was one of many countries around the globe that intended to increase the shares of the energy production from renewable energy resources by setting up a regulation that define exactly this minimum required share which called “Renewable Portfolio Standard”. Due to their availability and low investment cost compared to other renewable resources wind and Photovoltaic (PV) technologies were the dominant resources to achieve these targets. The objective of this paper is to analyze the behavior and the stability of the Jordanian electrical system in the presence of such large amount of intermittent renewable generation units after expected severe disturbances like faults events, loss of generation units, and sudden decrease in the production of renewable resources units. PSSE program is used to simulate the dynamic analysis. The study shows that the risk of integrating more intermittent renewable resources on the Jordanian electrical system is massively increased if it is working independent of the Egyptian electrical system; i.e. while the electrical interconnection between the two countries is out of service, where any loss of large generating unit or fast decrease in the generated power from renewable energy resources will cause significant drop in the frequency of the system.