Impact of high penetration of wind and solar PV generation on the country power system load: The case study of Croatia.

Even though the Republic of Croatia is on track of achieving goals set in the Europe 2020 strategy, to achieve the goals set in the 2030 European framework for climate and energy policies will require more effort. The new 2030 framework calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% compared to the 1990 level, yet the Republic of Croatia does not have such an ambitious plan. In times when wind plants and photovoltaic systems have reached grid parity in the majority of European countries, this paper analysed the influence of construction of wind and photovoltaic power plants in order to present the optimal constructing ratio of such systems on the Croatian power system load. Simulations have been conducted in the EnergyPLAN model for the year 2012. After the simulation presented promising scenarios, applying the Pareto analysis showed the optimal scenario for generating electricity from renewables, scenario with the lowest import of electricity, scenario with the lowest CO 2 emissions and with the lowest critical excess electricity production. In addition, all of the scenarios were subjected to a multiple criteria decision analysis in order to find the best overall scenario. After showing that the best overall scenario was 1.65 GW of wind power plants and 1.6 GW of installed PV capacity, a multi-criteria analysis was performed in order to observe the behaviour of grading the scenarios. Indeed, all of the simulations proved that PV will have a bigger role in the Republic of Croatia than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]