Towards an energy-autonomous campus: "Blueprint for a distributed, renewables-based interconnected energy system"

Abstract

South Africa’s endowment with worldclass solar and wind resources, combined with recent strong cost decreases for solar and wind technologies, makes renewable power generation now a cost-competitive new-build option in the country, and will be one building block in South Africa’s journey towards a more diversified energy mix. However, for the successful deployment of renewable and clean energy technologies on a large scale, significant research is required on technology level, and from an energy-system integration perspective. New cross-cutting technologies, such as energy storage, power-to-gas/-liquids, demand-side management and grid-related information technologies to manage bi-directional power flows are required to enable the stable operations of an energy system with a large share of renewables. The CSIR Energy Centre’s research will be brought to direct application on the CSIR’s campuses across the country. Renewable energy technologies is fairly new to South Africa and, although, the country has done very well in introducing the technology at utility scale, there is still very little progress in the embedded generation/small-scale domain. It is also important to note that the introduction of renewable energy generation is foreign to the South African electricity grid (at all levels), and some development work is already being done to address high- and medium- voltage networks. Of particular interest is the low-voltage network as very little progress is evident in this category. Some key questions remain in this sector, e.g. how should low-voltage networks of the future be planned to cater for embedded generation, how will the current networks respond to large volumes of embedded generation, what should be the control methodologies to be applied, what are the operation and maintenance philosophies to effectively manage this, and many more questions. A real-world energy-autonomous campus with a mix of renewable energy technologies (solar PV, wind and biomass/ biogas) will assist in creating a platform to address the abovementioned questions.