Operational Planning of a Hybrid Power Plant for Off-Grid Mining Site: A Risk-constrained Optimization Approach

One of the difficulties of mining worldwide is that it must be carried out in remote places without grid connection. Therefore it is important to choose the most profitable and reliable combination of energy sources for electrification. In this paper, different technologies to meet the demand of a mine located in Western Australia are studied. Using HOMER Pro, several viable systems, for the resources considered, are obtained. Using analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the most suitable case is selected for further study. Using Monte-Carlo simulations several scenarios are developed for the study of uncertainties, and a risk-constrained optimization algorithm is implemented to obtain the optimal scheduling, the expected cost and conditional value at risk (CVaR). Numerical results demonstrate that the variations of operation cost and CVaR with the increase in risk aversion factor are not of high magnitude, due to rather low variable operation costs of renewable energy sources. It is shown that the proposed hybrid electrification plan, based on WT, PVs and battery, could not only provide a reliable power generation, but also very low daily operating cost.