In order to mitigate climate change, each country signed the Paris Agreement submits the reduction target of greenhouse gas and takes actions to achieve the target. Because renewable energy sources is one of the promising measures, the penetration of wind power generations and photovoltaic power generations is increasing rapidly around the world. In Japan, renewable energy sources are recognized as one of the main power sources in the 5^th Strategic Energy Plan, the penetration will be increased for the future. However, because of the intermittency and variability, it is anticipated that the high penetration of renewable energy sources causes some negative impacts on stable operation of electric power system.

In order to realize reliable operation of electric power system even with the high penetration of renewable energy sources, the planning and operation of power should be made in consideration of power output characteristics of renewable energy generations based on highly accurate and reliable power output forecasting. Besides, electricity demand control to support power supply and demand balancing should be implemented.

Focusing on these issues to be solved for the future electric power system, our laboratory is working on the following research topics.

1. Electric Power System Planning Operation

• Development of unit commitment scheduling method in consideration of uncertainty of power output forecasting of renewable energy sources
• Development of power supply and demand operation in consideration of short term fluctuation characteristics of renewable power generations
• Modeling of temporal and spatial distribution of future electric power demand in consideration of change in population and energy demand profiles

2. Renewable Power Output Forecasting and its Utilization

• Development of day-ahead forecasting of renewable power output based on numerical weather prediction model
• Development of several hours-ahead forecasting and nowcasting of renewable power output using satellite imageries and all-sky imageries

3. Energy Management contributing to Supply & Demand Operation

• Development of smart inverter for photovoltaic power generation contributing to power supply and demand balancing
• Development of energy management method of microgrid based on forecasting of renewable energy generations
• Potential assessment of energy management in consideration of consumers acceptance

Fig. Short term forecasting of spatial distribution of irradiance