Integrating Reliability Engineering and Resilience Assessment for Hybrid Renewable Energy Facilities Management in Northern Communities of Canada

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposed discovery program will explore development of various integrated assessment, optimization, and simulation models advocating a tri-level value chain-reliability-resiliency analysis for integration of renewable energy technologies at the community scale in northern Canada. The main challenge and barrier to such a transition rests in low economy of scale due to small sizes of these communities and their vast geographical dispersion. In addition, RES accounts for various technologies such as bioenergy, wind, solar, and geothermal, with varied availability and potentials across the north. At the value-chain level, the program investigates optimal or equilibrium coordination of suppliers of technologies or fuels (in case of biomass), transport and logistics firms, and communities. We explore development of a host of optimization, game-theoretic, agent-based approaches in modeling and analysis of such value-chains. At the reliability engineering level, the goal would be on 1) investigating the degradation and failure profile of renewable energy facilities through a bottom-up (components to system) approach using time-series analysis subject to operational conditions in the north, 2) optimizing for maximum availability of the facilities considering the remoteness of the communities and reflecting the significance of operational continuity of these facilities and 3) proposing community-specific maintenance scheduling approaches to align the established failure profiles with the optimal availability scenarios. At the resiliency level, indicators and indices for resiliency assessment of renewable energy technologies, specific to northern communities, will be developed across various technologies (biomass, wind, solar, and geothermal) and subject to future climatic scenarios and forecasts for extreme conditions. The proposed tri-level analysis targets a whole-system understanding of the opportunities and challenges of renewable energy adoption in northern communities of Canada as well as a comparative analysis of alternative renewable energy technologies in terms of value-chain, reliability, and resiliency perspectives. As such, a hybrid approach to renewable energy adoption is promoted with involvement of multiple sources of energy coupled with energy storage capacities to ensure value-added and continuous renewable energy supply pathways for northern communities that could withstand and respond to the extreme and changing climate in these geographies. In this regard, the main objective of the proposed research program is to establish a research environment for training of high qualified PhD and MSc students in hybrid renewable energy facilities management solutions for off-grid and remote communities in Canada in line with federal and provincial targets for decarbonisation of the economy, need to post COVID-19 economic recovery, and the emerging attention to northern communities and uplifting of the quality of life for their residents.