Multi-objective distributionally robust approach for optimal location of renewable energy sources☆

Abstract

Wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are intermittent and uncertain energy sources that disturb grid planning operations. In this paper, we establish a multi-objective distributionally robust optimization model for optimal locations of wind turbines and solar photovoltaics (PV) that minimize the variance of renewable energy sources and maximize power production. Moreover, this paper evaluates the accuracy of the Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA), Deep Learning Gated Recurrent unit (GRU), and Deep Learning Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as forecasting models for wind speed and solar irradiation and compares their root mean square errors (RMSE). Using the forecasting error information, we characterize the uncertain variables in the ambiguity set, incorporating the bounds, means, and covariance values. Furthermore, we propose a modified multi-objective non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) approach to achieve a tractable Pareto front solution. To verify the effectiveness of the model, we use the actual candidate sites for wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in Saudi Arabia. The results demonstrate that our proposed model is an attractive and less conservative solution than a multi-objective robust optimization model when considering forecasting uncertainties.

Keywords

• Wind turbines
• Solar PV
• Variance
• ARMA
• GRU
• LSTM