Island Power Management using a Marine Current Turbine Farm and an Ocean Compressed Air Energy Storage System

Abstract

Due to the high predictability and the high energy density, marine tidal resource has become an area of increasing interest with various academic and industrial projects around the world. In fact, several Marine Current Turbine (MCT) farm projects with multi-megawatt capacity are planned to be installed in the coming years. In this paper, an MCT farm is supposed to be associated to the energy supply of a stand-alone island. In order to compensate the MCT farm power variation due to tidal phenomenon, an Ocean Compressed Air Energy Storage (OCAES) system is considered to achieve the island power management. In this work, conventional Diesel Generators (DGs) would only serve as a backup supply while the main island power supply will be fulfilled by the proposed hybrid MCT/OCAES system. Simulations under different working conditions are carried out to validate the feasibility of the hybrid power system.