Ensuring Low-Cost Reliability: Resource Adequacy Recommendations for a Clean Energy Grid

The controversial topic of resource adequacy (RA) is undergoing fundamental reassessment to
function properly with the future resource mix. This report integrates legal, technical, economic, and institutional considerations into a set of recommendations. We evaluate some of the main RA approaches and offer ways for each of them to be improved to better function with the future resource mix.…

User Objectives and Design Approaches for Microgrids: Options for Delivering Reliability and Resilience, Clean Energy, Energy Savings, and Other Priorities

Customers choose to install microgrids based on a wide range of motivations, which often include increasing reliability and resilience, decreasing electricity costs, expanding access to clean energy, and/or providing power to remote communities (e.g., when extending the existing transmission/distribution grid is infeasible or too costly). Customer motivations are not mutually exclusive; in fact, customers often have multiple motivations for installing a microgrid, such as increasing renewable generation while improving reliability and resilience. This paper cites numerous examples of operational microgrids across the country that represent one or more of these objectives.…

Maintaining Reliability in Power Grids with High Levels of Wind and Solar

This fact sheet examines maintaining reliability in power grids with high levels of wind and solar energy.

The power system is evolving quickly as increasing numbers of countries, states, and utilities set 100 percent renewable or 100 percent carbon-free goals. Responding to a number of technical considerations for operating a power grid with increasing levels of renewable generation, system planners, system operators, and utilities are developing innovative ways to increase the flexibility and maintain the reliability of a cleaner power system.

Two aspects of wind and solar generation that call for changes to power system operation are their variability and …

Powering Into The Future: Renewable Energy, Reliability, And Reshaping The Grid

Wind and solar are America’s fastest-growing fuel sources and are making our nation’s power system cleaner and more reliable than ever. Powering into the Future, a new report by M.J. Bradley & Associates, explains the basics of the electric grid and shows how grid operators reliably integrate renewable energy into the system.…

Changing Uses of the Electric Grid: Reliability Challenges and Concerns

There are many new demands being placed on the electric grid, the nation’s network of power plants, long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and local low-voltage distribution wires. The grid is increasingly being used differently than before. We now have distributed generation (numerous scattered small-scale producers of electricity); smart grids (digital monitoring of electrical flows); microgrids (small-scale electrical networks able to be isolated from the grid); demand response (payments or credits to customers who cut their electricity use at critical times); energy efficiency (using less electricity) and energy storage (holding electricity for release at later critical times). In addition, we have competition …

Integrating Renewable Energy into the Electricity Grid: Case Studies Showing How Technologies and Operations are Maintaining Reliability

Earlier this year, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) issued an “initial reliability review” in which it identified elements of EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan that could lead to reliability concerns. One of the issues identified by NERC was the challenge of integrating variable renewable resources, such as wind and solar, into the power system at the levels contemplated by the CPP.

The Advanced Energy Economy Institute commissioned The Brattle Group, a leading consulting firm to utilities and grid operators, to provide an overview of how utilities and grid operators were integrating variable renewable resources while maintaining reliable electric …

Renewables and Reliability: Grid Management Solutions to Support California’s Clean Energy Future

California leads the nation in the transition to clean, safe, and renewable forms of electricity. The state is well on its way to supplying 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and is now considering a policy to get to 50 percent by 2030 — the most ambitious clean energy effort in the nation.

Ramping up renewable energy to this level is not only visionary, it’s realistic and achievable. To accomplish it, grid operators must effectively integrate an increasing amount of renewable electricity while maintaining cost-effective and reliable electricity to ratepayers.

The solutions are at hand. As …

Renewables and Reliability: Grid Management Solutions to Support California’s Clean Energy Future

California leads the nation in the transition to clean, safe, and renewable forms of electricity. The state is well on its way to supplying 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and is now considering a policy to get to 50 percent by 2030—the most ambitious clean energy effort in the nation.

Satisfying half of California’s electricity needs with renewable energy is not only visionary, but also necessary to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels that contribute to global warming and air pollution. Fortunately, this goal is also achievable. As the state plans for this clean electricity …

Assessing Emerging Policy Threats to the U.S. Power Grid: How Regulations, Mandates, and Subsidies Undermine Electric Reliability

Reliable, affordable electricity is critical to our well-being and essential to modern life. But today, threats to the reliability of the power grid are numerous: cyber-attacks, weather, and accidents. Fortunately, the most significant threat is also the most avoidable—bad policy. Federal and state policies are already increasing electricity bills around the country, and the worst effects are yet to come. The federal government, and particularly the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is promulgating regulations that will reduce the reliability of the power grid with little thought of the consequences. In fact, these policies threaten to take offline 130 gigawatts of reliable …

Improving the Reliability and Resiliency of the US Electric Grid

Across the US, efforts to accelerate the modernization of the nation’s electric grid are progressing, with more than 300 Recovery Act funded projects supporting a wide range of initiatives to improve the reliability, resiliency and security of the grid, help consumers become more energy efficient, and enable the growth of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power currently underway.

The projects, which received $4.167 billion in funding and are managed by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, address a wide range of grid modernization needs, including demonstrating the use and benefits of advanced …