| Renewable solar, tidal and wind energy have the potential of reducing dependency on fossil fuels and their environmentally negative impacts. Because of their variability, wind and solar energy in particular impose added costs on electrical grids as system operators attempt to balance operation of existing thermal power plants. In this regard, tidal stream power has an advantage over solar and wind energy as tides are predictable and comparatively regular; yet, tides remain intermittent and thereby still may create inefficiencies to the grid. In this paper, we develop a dynamic optimization framework for analyzing the allocation of power output across generating sources when tidal and wind power are added to the system. In particular, we minimize the cost... |
