Optimum Decision Policy for Replacement of Conventional Energy Sources by Renewable Ones

With the increase of world population and industrial growth of developing countries, demand for energy, in particular electric power, has gone up at an unprecedented rate over the last four decades. To meet the demand, electric power generation by use of fossil fuel has increased enormously thereby producing increased quantity of greenhouse gases contributing more and more to atmospheric pollution which, climate Scientists believe, can adversely affect the global climate, and health and welfare of world population. In view of these, there is global awareness of looking for alternate sources of energy such as natural gas, hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal and finally biomass etc. It is recognized that this requires replacement of existing infrastructure with new systems, which cannot be achieved overnight. Optimal control theory has been widely used for the last five decades in diverse areas of physical sciences, medicine, engineering, economics and social sciences. The main motivation of this article is to use this theory to find the optimum strategy (decision or policy) for integration of all currently available renewable energy sources with the existing electric power generating systems with the ultimate goal of elimination of fossil fuel. Eight main energy sources such as Coal, Petroleum, Natural Gas, Conventional Hydro, Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Biomass are considered in a dynamic model. The state of the dynamic model represents the level of power generation from each of the sources at any time t. The proposed objective function is based on the desired target level of power generation from each of the available sources at the end of the plan period while reducing the production of greenhouse gasses. Pontryagin Minimum principle is used to determine the optimal control or decision policy. Official released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration is used as a case study. Based on this data and a mathematical model proposed in a paper (Miah, Ahmed and Chowdhury, 2012) published by Energy Economics combined with the minimum principle, an optimal policy is presented for integration of renewable energy sources to the national power grid.

並列關鍵字

Optimization ； Mathematical Models ； Optimal Control ； Optimum Decision Policy ； Conventional and Renewable Energy Sources

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