Assessment of Wind Power Integration into the Synthetic Electric Grid of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Saudi Arabia is working to reduce its dependence on oil and diversify its economy by incorporating renewable energy into its plans, as part of the initiative Vision 2030. A significant challenge in this change is the integration of renewable energy, particularly wind energy, into the existing Saudi Arabian electricity grid. Wind energy offers significant economic and environmental benefits, including reducing carbon emissions and providing a cost-effective energy source. However, integrating wind power presents challenges, particularly in maintaining grid frequency stability during different disturbances and ensuring that wind farms comply with grid codes to operate efficiently within the system. To perform tests for the effectiveness of wind integration, an adaptive synthetic Saudi electric grid model was built based on data of the Saudi power grid collected from open source data, designed to simulate the transient dynamics of a Saudi power grid, in order to enable simulation and assessment of wind energy integration into the electricity system of Saudi Arabia. For higher accuracy and details, the model created by CURENT Large-scale Testbed (LTB) and its ANDES package.