The overall objective of InnoTherm 2013 call for proposals is to support the implementation of the Moroccan National Energy Strategy presented by the Ministry of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment in 2009. The strategy shall contribute to the security of energy supply, access for all to energy at reasonable costs, diversification of national energy sources to reduce the dependence on imports and environmental protection. Those objectives shall be achieved by sustainable and competitive technologies, improved energy efficiency and the support of the utilization of renewables energies.

To support these objectives this call for proposals aims to develop applied R&D capacities in the field of renewable energies through strengthening the link between Moroccan universities, research institutions and relevant Moroccan industries.

The call for proposals is implemented by the Research Institute for Solar and New Energies - Institut de Recherche en Energie Solaire et en Energie Nouvelles (IRESEN) under the supports of the Ministry of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment.

The Ecole Mohammedia d'Ingénieurs (EMI) is a unique school of its kind in Morocco. Indeed, it is the only engineering school in Morocco which has a multidisciplinary training with nine departments in all engineering courses , distributed in the last year over seventeen specialties , including among others, the electrical , networking and telecommunications, computer , electrical and mechanical energy. Strong by its faculty members of international experience and reference at national and international level. Thanks to the collaboration between two teams, namely the team Microelectronics embedded-systems from the Laboratory of Electronics and Communication (LEC) and the electrical team, a joint team was established within the electrical department and works mainly in synergy on issues affecting the field of energy renewable. Based on its know- how of this new team, several international publications have been produced among others on Microgrids.

Michigan Technological University (MTU) offers more than 130 undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, natural and physical sciences, computing, business and economics, technology, environmental studies, arts, humanities, and social sciences. The university is divided into five schools and colleges. The average overall ACT scores for incoming students is 26.4 in fall 2010, compared to 21.2 nationally. The College of Engineering's environmental engineering and mechanical engineering enrollments rank in the top ten nationally. The electrical engineering department uses an innovative "DSP First" curriculum found at only a few leading universities. Agile Interconnected Microgrids (AIM) is a multidisciplinary research center with a broad research goal of solving future, long-term technical challenges of our Nation’s energy objective through microgrid modeling, control, and optimization. AIM has many research threads all focused towards achieving a single goal – scalable and flexible energy resource planning and execution for military and commercial sectors. The areas of research include; stability, optimization and control, cyber security, economics, intelligent power electronics, and human factors.

The National Office of Water and Electricity (ONEE) is the only Moroccan operator of the country's electricity supply. Public institution of industrial and commercial character created in 1963, it employs approximately 9,000 employees and has approximately 4 million subscribers. Among its mission is to meet the electricity demand of Morocco at the best possible cost and quality of service.

In recent years, the interest of many countries turned to the use of new and renewable energy sources (RES) in the production of electrical energy. This is for various reasons, environmental, economic and even political ones. The three main categories of these types of resources, photovoltaic (PV), wind (Wind) and finally the solar thermal concentration (CSP). Morocco has launched in 2009 the Moroccan Solar Plan with the objective of achieving an installed capacity of 2GW solar, 2GW of wind and 2GW hydraulic power which represent almost 42% of total electric power installed by 2020 [1]. A very ambitious plan, which of course requires extensive studies to determine exactly how, when and with what technologies Morocco could achieve this goal. Several scientific studies have been conducted precisely to estimate the optimal penetration rate for each technique (PV, Wind and CSP) [2] and with different integration scenarios and various criteria. Such studies provide valuable results for a given scenario and should be conducted in each country hoping to achieve high penetration rate increased to the optimal use of existing resources such as grid capacity on the one hand, and to attract investors in short and long terms, on the other hand.


Several of these studies raise two major issues in a scenario with high rate of penetration of renewable energy sources into the grid, namely:


• The optimal configuration of penetration of each technology renewable resource, ie, PV, wind and CSP with storage. Indeed, it depends on several parameters and functions dependent on one another, in particular,
  • The cost of each technology, including the investment, maintenance and replacement cost [3] considering the lifespan of the installation.
  • The stability of the network integrating intermittent resources [4].
  • System reliability in terms of unmet demand. Indeed, there has in the literature several reliability parameters such as the probability of loss ( LOLP ) and expected energy not supplied (UES) [5].
  • Reserve power needed to achieve the desired penetration [6].
  • Contribution of storage in the power reserves especially in the case of CSP [7].
• Given the optimal system configuration, other problems have raised the level of implementation of this solution, including
  • Since the implementation of these renewable energy resources is gradual, the question is what is the best way to gradually adapt to it while maintaining the stability of the current grid.
  • By what technology and/or human means these renewable resources will be managed.
  • Due to the intermittent nature of these resources, management in near real time is required even necessary.
  • We will opt for a centralised management of these resources, or rather a distributed management.

Unlike conventional energy sources, PV or Wind provide intermittent power, non-controllable and non-dispatchable. Indeed, in the conventional electric network, production and dispatchable load changes or unforeseen incidents are managed primarily by three types of reserves: primary, secondary and tertiary, which are classified according to the duration of action permitted from of a few seconds to a few hours. However, in a scenario with a high penetration of intermittent sources whose forecasts are still unclear, it should appeal to a huge reserve to ensure network stability. This reserve is based primarily on storage, such as batteries, energy transfer stations by pumping ( STEPs ) and gas pressure [2]. However, these types of storage are generally very expensive or very limited storage capacity. Another alternative has been studied by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL ) to analyse the possibility of using an interactive mix between PV and Wind with CSP plants with storage [7]. This study demonstrates that the use of CSP with its advantage of thermal storage over long periods to 14 hours or even more, would help manage the intermittent energy sources and non-controllable and allow greater system stability. The design of such solutions depends on several parameters, which makes the performance of these solutions specific to each region of the world with its various constraints. A recent study from the same laboratory NREL shows that in the context of California, the adoption of CSP promises better benefits that PV technology, even if a priori the cost per unit of power produced by the PV is lower than that produced by CSP, and emphasises the point of the importance of studying the contribution of CSP in the management of electrical network especially when planning a very high penetration rates.

The overall objective of the project is to study the contribution of CSP with storage in increasing the penetration of renewable energy [8, 9, 10, 11] guaranteeing greater grid stability, specifically the use MicroCSP of a distributed manner in the network. The specificity of this project is that it combines between a search and optimisation component in the Moroccan context, and a second technical component, which aims to validate the results obtained in a real case by establishing a system MicroCSP (10kW) and a MicroPV system (4kW) to test results on the same campus of the EMI.




Indeed, the project will be split into two parts: The first concerns the modelling of CSP stations with or without storage to define their roles in increasing the penetration of renewable energy sources on the one hand, and the stabilisation of system, on the other hand. We propose to develop a new optimisation model which aims to consider several possible scenarios that include not only the climatic parameters and economic but also specific parameters Moroccan power grid, such as the load curve, the capacity of the existing network, production data, future forecast, etc..Data on the grid will be provided by our industrial partner namely the National Office of Electricity and drinking water (ONEE).


This section aims to provide local authorities especially in the MENA region are in the process of transforming their conventional power systems to a large system integration rate in renewables. This part of the project will aim to provide a detailed map and technologies to combine optimal levels in terms of PV, wind and particularly CSP, and at the same time to determine the appropriate rate according to each technology in order to attract investors and further motivate investment in CSP and other RES short term.




Knowing that the implementation of the following facilities will be a gradual plan of action, it was decided to manage the intermittency in a distributed manner with local storage via MicroCSP among others. This will use the current system of dispatching in harmony with distributed management of renewable energy resources. For these reasons, the second part will address the real-time management of a mix system in the EMI, consisting of a PV park and a MicroCSP platform to partially mitigate unforeseen changes in PV production. To do this, we hope to develop these systems and subsequently develop within the EMI management system, power electronics and software parts, which are based on various sensors to remotely manage the percentage of each resource to ensure the stability of the local electric network of the EMI.


The software is primarily intended to manage the storage and dispatchable power MicroCSP so to compensate for variations in the photovoltaic or wind generation. This part is based on the study of power management and storage CSP generation, performed in the first part. The objective is to apply optimisation methods that provide better system reliability, close to that of the conventional system based fuel, in terms of meeting the demand.

• Project coordination
• Schedule and project management
• Coordination of Results Dissemination
• Acquisition of Electrical grid data and the capacity of Morocco in REN integration
• Rate estimation of the optimal penetration capacity for each technology (PV, Wind and CSP) in the Moroccan electrical grid.
• Study of the CSP impact in a High-penetration scenario on the stability of the electric grid.
• Monitoring the generated power from the CSP to offset the variations of PV.
• Software development for real time monitoring
• Determine the percentage of each CSP, PV and wind to integrate into the Moroccan power grid
• Simulation of the study performance
• Design of a communication infrastructure for a network based on a micro CSP
• Test the reliability monitoring system developed for the proposed system

• Support the Design of an intelligent monitoring system for load balancing of a network based on a CSP with storage and photovoltaic panels
• Help and support in the study of the integration of CSP in the Moroccan grid
• Support the Economic Survey of the implementation of the CSP in the Moroccan power grid in the short term
• Support the calculations of the cost of energy generation by the CSP
• Transfer of skills where desired
• Attend and support workshops and internships, as mutually agreed

• Access to relevant data of the Moroccan electricity network for the study
• Engineering assistance in the design of the MicroCSP and PV platform at EMI
• Monitoring and support in the hardware installation
• Transfer of acquired skills
• Transfer of skills where desired.
• Internships for students