Degree: Electrical & Electronic Engineering
University: Victoria
Division: Operations
Team: Power Systems Group, Engineering Assurance
Over the summer I interned within the Power Systems Group, in the Engineering Assurance team. The Engineering Assurance team are the guardians that ensure, monitor and track compliance with applicable regulations and industry codes within the System Operator for new and existing participants. These are split into different areas within the team including Ancillary Service Tendering Support, Black Start Testing, Asset Capability Statements management and assessment Commissioning & Testing Management/Facilitation.
My summer project aligned closely with my specialisation of Renewable Energy Systems and was broken into two key parts.
In part one, I investigated the daily, monthly and seasonal solar panel generation curves of two solar farms to see how the average generation at the time of peak load changes throughout the year. This was important as the script I wrote for this section of my project can be used to verify solar trigger assumptions in the EMI case.
The second part of my project involved a feature called Quasi Dynamic Simulation in PowerFactory (which runs multiple steady state simulations for a particular time period and stitches them together). I used it in conjunction with a photovoltaic system element and investigated whether the PV element could be used to accurately simulate solar farm power generation throughout the year. The project has allowed me to develop my skills in Python (which I used to process and plot the data), and introduced me to various features in PowerFactory.
During the summer I was also lucky enough to get to spend time in the control room simulator, shadow the control room for a morning and go on a site visit to a local substation.