Modelling, Simulation and Analysis of Tunisian Electricity System

Modelling, Simulation and Analysis of Tunisian Electricity System; The Thesis is concentrated on the modelling of the actual power generation system and high voltage transmission and distribution infrastructure of Tunisia with the perspective of optimization of the power flow (OPF). The backbone and starting point of the project was a database of the power system inventory of the country. Because of the lack of such data, a big part of the work was concentrated on the data mining and validation of the collected data through reliable sources or information published by authorities. The data must involve all present power plants with their generation capacity, number of production units and fuel type as well as the location of the power stations and the present levels of tension. Data Collection process needed to be done also for the transmission lines and their characteristics and for the power stations and their geographic distribution in Tunisia. After constructing database, the structure of the model was implemented on the QGIS software with a high level of accuracy. Afterwards, the coincidence matrices of the different parts of the system were constructed to be implemented in the OPF model and Matpower software. The model requires three such matrices and a cost matrix and are the mathematical representation of the power system in nodes(stations and/or generators) and the arcs(power lines). In the next step, to generate the hourly monthly electricity demand profile of the country an “adequate” and “available” demand profile was needed. One possible solution was to choose a reference country which has many similar economic indexes and energetic characteristics with Tunisia, and uses its demand profile as ”data Generator”. Considering different micro and macro-economic factors such as energy consumption per capita and GDP, the most suitable country was considered to be Bulgaria. Then the Bulgarian demand profile was normalized on the electricity demand of Tunisia in 2016 and is distributed between different power stations. For the repartition of the demand between stations, some reliable criteria were needed. Again referring to economic indicators, the share of each province from the industry sector and their number of inhabitants was selected as the indicator for the distribution of total electricity consumption. The matrices were implemented in the Matpower program and DCOPF analyze was performed to obtain the minimum cost of production. The solution of the minimization should also guarantee the demand coverage and technical limits of power plants (e.g. nominal power) and lines (e.g. transmission capacity)