The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
Resource Library
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Substations are a key part of every utility’s infrastructure, but their quiet dependability makes them a vulnerable part of the power grid. They work until they don’t. When a utility only services substations after a fault or outage, they should expect long, slow, and expensive repairs along with frustrated rate payers.
Regular assessment and preventative maintenance is key to substation resilience, and can ensure that the substations your customers count on keep running with no interruptions. Ensuring that substations and other transmission infrastructure are properly maintained is key to reduced total cost of ownership and customer value creation.…
View Full ResourceIn April 2019, WPTO launched the HydroWIRES Initiative to understand, enable, and improve hydropower and pumped storage hydropower’s (PSH’s) contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in the rapidly evolving U.S. electricity system. The unique characteristics of hydropower, including PSH, make it well suited to provide a range of storage, generation flexibility, and other grid services to support the cost-effective integration of variable renewable resources. The U.S. electricity system is rapidly evolving, bringing both opportunities and challenges for the hydropower sector. While increasing deployment of variable renewables such as wind and solar have enabled low-cost, clean energy in many U.S. regions, …
View Full ResourceWinter Storm Elliott hit the eastern United States over the Dec. 23–25 weekend and tested the reliability of much of the Eastern Interconnection. Precipitous temperature drops and powerful winds caused widespread generator failures and froze up natural gas supplies while driving up electricity demand, leading to power outages in some of PJM’s neighbors.
PJM and its members were able to maintain the reliability of the system, serve customers and even support neighboring systems during some periods, which was a significant accomplishment. Specifically, PJM operators were able to avoid electricity interruptions throughout this event. Nevertheless, PJM operators had to implement multiple …
View Full ResourceExplore ways in which municipalities, federal agencies, healthcare facilities, and private sector companies can leverage their energy infrastructure to improve energy resilience and minimize the adverse impacts of major events.
To date, much of the interest in energy resilience has been limited to a few key sectors; however, as addressed throughout this white paper, a wide range of organizations, public and private, are beginning to understand that they can use their energy infrastructure to become more resilient in budget-sensitive ways.
A smart approach to resilience integrates innovative technological solutions, contracting structures, and participation in broader energy markets. Organizations can become …
View Full ResourceThe global effort to curb carbon emissions is accelerating demand for clean energy technologies and the materials they rely on. Demand for these materials will only continue to grow, especially as some nations aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. While some major materials like steel, copper, and aluminum are already powering the fossil fuel economy, others are more minor materials with potential supply risks. These risks could jeopardize the ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the desirable timeframe to avoid significant climate change. In some cases, it may be necessary to take action to improve the resilience of …
View Full ResourceWith soaring energy costs for American families, electric grid-induced fires burning up the West Coast, and the looming threat of power blackouts, the need for equitable, affordable, and resilient local clean energy has never been clearer.
Today, corporate utilities and Wall Street control much of the country’s clean energy infrastructure. They prioritize profits over people, keeping many of the benefits of clean energy for themselves. But if households and communities owned more of this clean energy, we could maximize the positive local impacts while putting power back in the hands of people to meet their own energy needs. This melds …
View Full ResourceAs part of the ETC’s Barriers to Clean Electrification series, this Insights Briefing focuses on the issue of supply chain risks. The importance of supply chain issues for the energy transition has recently come to the fore in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. In 2021–2022, as the global economy re-started following the pandemic prices for commodities and raw materials (e.g., steel, copper), and shipping and freight
rates shot up, leading to cost increases for wind turbines and batteries. Furthermore, these dynamics have served to catalyse a series of policy choices to relocate the production of …
This year’s State of Reliability (SOR) is comprised of two publications: the 2023 State of Reliability Overview, which is a high-level summary of the important findings, and this 2023 State of Reliability Technical Assessment, which provides NERC’s detailed comprehensive and annual technical review of BPS reliability for the 2022 operating (calendar) year.
The 2023 State of Reliability Overview replaces the executive summary normally found in NERC reports. This 2023 State of Reliability Technical Assessment provides detailed descriptions of key findings and key occurrences for 2022 along with in-depth analysis of risks and resilience, grid transformation, grid performance, and the status …
View Full ResourceThis paper examine the potential to use the US rail system as a nationwide backup transmission grid over which containerized batteries, or rail-based mobile energy storage (RMES), are shared among regions to meet demand peaks, relieve transmission congestion and increase resilience. We find that RMES is a feasible reliability solution for low-frequency, high-impact events and quantify its cost effectiveness relative to reliability-driven investments in transmission infrastructure and stationary capacity. Compared to new transmission lines and stationary battery capacity, deploying RMES for such events could save the power sector upwards of US$300 per kW-year and US$85 per kW-year, respectively. While no …
View Full Resource“This paper identifies and evaluates issues in traditional resource adequacy (RA) assessment practices, and how adjusting these practices may affect and depend on existing institutional arrangements for planning and procurement. The paper proposes a technical-institutional roadmap that would allow regulators in vertically-integrated jurisdictions and system planners and operators in restructured jurisdictions to revise RA practices across a range of components.First, we compile a critical review of current RA assessment practices based on (1) interviews with RA practitioners and (2) a review of recent technical literature. We find that (i) RA may need to expand beyond capacity adequacy to ensure energy …
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