Impacts of COVID-19 on Kuwait’s Electric Power Grid

Al-Abdullah, Yousef M.; Al-Saffar, Mahdi Al-Azmi Ahmad Sahraei-Ardakani Mostafa

In response to a request from Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water, a resource adequacy model was developed to assess Kuwait’s ability to supply sufficient energy to meet the load demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Power system operators and utilities use this type of model to ascertain their ability to meet demand, most notably peak demand. The model includes active power loss as well as the loss of resource capacity under medium and large contingencies. As resource adequacy models do not take into account security constraints such as transmission limits and voltage, they cannot be used for operations. However, due to their simplicity, they are appropriate for studying a wide range of scenarios for formulating policy decisions. Resource adequacy analysis can provide valuable insights into the performance of a system under urgent conditions such as the one posed by COVID-19 and similar unforeseen disruptions. This model utilizes an analysis of historical load data to forecast the 2020 peak load and develop a number of scenarios to test the capacity margin of Kuwait’s power system. The scenarios vary based upon load growth (2-25%) and whether there is an outage or unavailable generation (no outage, 720 MW outage, 1440 MW, and 2400 MW outage).