Future Trends in Electricity Demand in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Region

Long-term electricity demand projections are fundamental for power generation expansion planning and for broader energy policy formulation. Studies show that electricity demand in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region has been growing rapidly over the past decades. This growth has several drivers, including economic growth, increasing populations and regulated electricity tariffs. However, energy price reforms and broader structural changes within these economies, along with energy efficiency initiatives and the exodus of expatriates, is flattening electricity demand.

A Stochastic Rolling Horizon-Based Approach for Power Generation Expansion Planning

Variable renewable energy sources introduce significant amounts of short-term uncertainty that should be considered when making investment decisions. In this work, we present a method for representing stochastic power system operation in day-ahead and real-time electricity markets within a capacity expansion model. We use Benders’ cuts and a stochastic rolling-horizon dispatch to represent operational costs in the capacity expansion problem (CEP) and investigate different formulations for the cuts. We test the model on a two-bus case study with wind power, energy storage, and a constrained transmission line. The case study shows that cuts created from the day-ahead problem gives the lowest expected total cost for the stochastic CEP. The stochastic CEP results in 3% lower expected total cost compared to the deterministic CEP capacities evaluated under uncertain operation. The number of required stochastic iterations is efficiently reduced by introducing a deterministic lower bound, while extending the horizon of the operational problem by persistence forecasting leads to reduced operational costs.