Integration of Renewable Energy and Pumped Storage Power Stations

Mochammad Ali Randy, PLN P2B, 88101061Z

Now days, the increasing primary energy from the depletion of fossil such as coal
and gas become serious concerns for Indonesia and necessitated government and also PLN
to realize the large-scale utilization of renewable energy (RE) soon to provide the needs of
electrical energy especially Java Bali Grid.
Java Bali Grid has reached its peak load at 25,872 MW on the 12th April 2018. At
18.00, and this trend will continue to rise in the future, following the economic development
of Indonesia which has been growing consistently at the level of more than 5% annually. To
sustain this economic development, government of Indonesia has launched a capacity
development in electricity sector, and aim to build 35.0000 MW of new generation plants. In
doing so, government has also set a target of improving fuel mix by introducing more of RE
into the system. It is envisage that by 2025 RE must be accounted for 25% of all electricity
generated in Indonesia[1].
For Java Bali Grid system, to achieve this much portion of renewable contribution, it
must be installed at least 15.000 MW renewable power plant on top of currently around
3.500 MW of Hydro and Geothermal power plant. From those 15.000 MW new renewable
power plants, it will consist of dispatchable and intermittent generator. The maturity level of
technology of renewable energy power plant has been reaching commercial level of
application and will be much reliable, cheaper technology available in the coming years. It
even has been reported that solar farm has reached a significant low cost of generation and
comparable to those of coal power plants[2].
Recently PLN has released 2 (two) renewable project power plant, first is the
pumped storage power station project at Cisokan, west Bandung (Total Output Capacity
1040 MW) and the second is Solar Power Plant at Cirata, West Java (Total Output Capacity
200 MW). The main purpose of those projects are to overcome the lack of power
consumption due to the increasing demand of electrical energy during peak load on Java
Bali grid system, so the reliability of Java Bali electricity system can be improved.
In Java Bali grid system, the peak load will occur in the period 17.00 to 22.00 WIB
(Waktu Indonesia Bagian Barat). Based on that condition, Java Bali need some of power
plant that have a large capacity and cheap for provision efficient and reliable electrical
energy. Pumped storage power stations are present to offer solution peak load problems in
Java Bali grid. At peak load, water flows through two tunnels (Headrace tunnel) and
penstock to an underground power house with a rated net head of about 276 m. The
capacity of each reservoir is about 10 million m3 which can be use to produce electricity
during peak loads period about 6.5 hours.
The upper Cisokan Pumped Storage Hydropower Scheme (UCPS) has two reservoir
at the bottom and top, by blocking the Cisokan river using RCC (Rolled Compacted
Concrete) concrete Dam as high as ± 98 m, and Dam that stem the Cirumamis river as high
± 75 m with RCC type also, there will be two puddle in two reservoirs that have a ± 300 m
height difference. Water from lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir by utilizing
the remaining the base load taken from Java interconnection system at low load.
At midnight, the unabsorbed electricity energy will be use to activate the Uper
Ciskoan Hydroelectric reversible generator which is used to energized the water booster
pump reservoir and by day (early morning till evening) the pump will be set using solar
energy, it takes 8.25 hours to fulfil the upper dam reservoir until standard level that can be
use at normal operation. To integrate several models of non renewable (thermal) and
renewable (hydro, steam and solar) power plant need a real time generation scheduling
system that can accommodate each other it is called automatic generation control (AGC)
that can dynamically transfer regulating reserve between the real time dispatching units and
AGC units to achieve three basic pillar of system operation (Reliability and security of
supply, quality of supply and economic operation of the system).

[1] PT PLN (Persero), “Development Plan of Electricity Infrastructure 2017-2026”, Jakarta, PLN Head Office, 2017
[2] Website : http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/solar-and-windpower-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-for-the-first-time-a7509251.html,
As accessed on 02 nd October 2017