Renewable Energy Integration in Diesel-Based Microgrids at the Canadian Arctic

Abstract

The effect of climate change is significant in the arctic regions of the world, with the carbon footprint from diesel-only based electricity generation in remote arctic communities adding to the environmental degradation through greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, oil spills, and black carbon. Moreover, the dependence on diesel and its associated costs are an economic problem for these communities, particularly in the Canadian Arctic, where governments subsidize this fuel. Thus, this article presents specific studies including new variable-speed generator (VSG) technologies that demonstrate the feasibility, impact, and benefits of introducing renewable energy (RE) together with VSGs in remote microgrids in the Canadian Arctic. More specifically, this article describes a two-step procedure to select remote communities for detailed feasibility studies of deployment of RE sources, including a generation expansion planning (GEP) framework and optimization model for RE and new VSG integration applied to the selected communities, to minimize diesel dependence of isolated microgrids and maximize the incorporation of environmentally friendly generation technologies. The proposed approach is applied to communities in Nunavut and the North West Territories in the Canadian Arctic, based on actual data, to study the technoeconomic feasibility of RE integration and develop business cases for diesel generation replacement with RE and VSG generation in these communities. The obtained optimal plans contain diesel-RE hybrid combinations that would yield substantial economic savings and reductions on GHG emissions, which are being used as the base for actual deployments in some of the studied communities.