Martina Calais

An energy study of the Carnarvon power system using load demand, irradiance and photovoltaic generation data acquired from the power system operator, for calender year 2018, has been performed. This study utilised the HOMER Pro simulation system to determine photovoltaic and battery capacities to be applied to the Carnarvon power system to operate, without fuelled prime mover driven synchronous generation (FSG) input, over a 24 hour cycle given adequate irradiation. This goal is realised by using a metric that balances competing mechanisms in deciding PV and battery storage capacities. The metric calculation resulted in capacities of 35MW for PV and 90MWhr for battery storage, resulting in a renewable energy fraction of 96.2 %, 589 hours of FSG operation and levelised cost of energy (LCoE) of 47.6c/kWhr. Power ratio and storage ratio give dimensionless quantities for PV and storage sizes relative to load demand. These values can estimate PV and battery capacities for similar systems in similar environments to achieve comparable outcomes. The determined capacity of 35MW of PV is assumed to be all roof-top installed. This is based on roof-top potential estimates, made in other work, of 70MW for Carnarvon.

Facilitating data sharing while upholding privacy is essential for driving meaningful insights, promoting informed decision-making, and fostering responsible data-driven solutions in today’s energy management. This is especially important in the context of load forecasting, where accurate predictions of energy consumption patterns are needed for efficient energy management. The existing models guarantee the protection of the load profile data of all households for low-aggregate level load forecasting. However, in the real world, some customers may be willing to fully share their data and others may not. Moreover, persuading some customers to give consent for direct use and full disclosure of their load profile data is not always possible. Accordingly, this paper introduces the concepts of full and limited consent levels- the former refers to the willingness of an individual to fully disclose their ground truth, otherwise, their privacy must be protected under the limited consent level while releasing the aggregate forecast. Moreover, this study contributes to the research gap on the intricate balance between utility and privacy in the domain of probabilistic low-aggregate load forecasting particularly when a community comprises various proportions of customers with full/limited consent levels. In doing so, a differential privacy (DP) model for short-term probabilistic load forecasting is used so that the user, such as grid operators or retail providers, receives the forecast retaining the 95% confidence interval (CI) of the unperturbed/original forecast. Furthermore, a Bayesian neural network (BNN) is utilized as the forecasting engine.

This paper describes the current control method and the switching scheme of a cascaded five level inverter based grid connected single phase photovoltaic system. For the current control a Dual Polarised Ramptime Zero Average Current Error control method is applied, which provides good current regulation, and a narrow ripple current frequency band. Simulation results which demonstrate the method are presented.
The redundant inverter states of the five level cascaded inverter allow for a cyclic switching scheme which minimises the switching frequency equalises stress evenly on all switches and minimises the voltage ripple on the DC capacitors. Simulation and experimental results of a multi carrier PWM voltage controller showing the effectiveness of the switching scheme are presented.

Various multicarrier pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques suitable for high power converter structures and capable of generating multilevel output voltage waveforms are discussed in this paper. Several interesting characteristics of the multicarrier disposition PWM techniques are revealed. A hybrid multicarrier PWM technique combining the disposition and the phase shifted concepts is considered. The performance of the various techniques with respect to the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output line voltage in the linear and over-modulation regions is reported. Two distortion factors associated with first- and second-order AC output filtering and for different amplitude modulation indices are presented and used as a measure of comparison for the techniques under consideration.