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.
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Governors have a strong interest in ensuring that the electric power grid functions safely, reliably, and efficiently. Although it functions well overall and utilities have made many upgrades, the grid needs modern technologies and new infrastructure to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, including mitigating increased storm- and cyber- related threats, integrating the use of more renewable energy resources, and capitalizing on the greater availability of data on grid performance and electricity usage. Most recently, an attack by gunmen on a utility substation in California that caused damage but did not result in a power outage has …
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Over time, one of the most critical aspects of the electric grid – it’s reliability – has steadily improved./ Today, outages on the Bulk Power System generally occur in only a handful of exceptional circumstances. Yet there are new factors and forces that are rapidly changing our energy supply mix in a manner that could fundamentally alter or degrade the system all segments of the industry have so carefully built. Among these are a mass of new environmental regulations that have contributed to the closure of many existing power plants and threaten to impact even more and, increasingly, subsidies and …
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Distributed electricity generation, especially solar PV, is rapidly spreading and getting much cheaper. Distributed electricity storage is doing the same, thanks largely to mass production of batteries for electric vehicles. Solar power is already starting to erode some utilities’ sales and revenues.
But what happens when solar and batteries join forces? Together they can make the electric grid optional for many customers—without compromising reliability and increasingly at prices cheaper than utility retail electricity. Equipped with a solar-plus-battery system, customers can take or leave traditional utility service with what amounts to a “utility in a box.”
This “utility in a box” …
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Microgrids – distributed systems of local energy generation, transmission, and use – are today technologically and operationally ready to pro- vide communities with electricity services, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas of less developed countries. Over 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity, which includes over 550 million people in Africa and 300 million people in India alone (International Energy Agency, 2012). In many of these places, the traditional approach to serve these communities is to extend the central grid. This approach is technically and financially inefficient due to a combination of capital scarcity, insufficient energy service, reduced …
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Modernizing the electric system will help the nation meet the challenge of handling projected energy needs—including addressing climate change by integrating more energy from renewable sources and enhancing efficiency from non-renewable energy processes. Advances to the electric grid must maintain a robust and resilient electricity delivery system, and energy storage can play a significant role in meeting these challenges by improving the operating capabilities of the grid, lowering cost and ensuring high reliability, as well as deferring and reducing infrastructure investments. Finally, energy storage can be instrumental for emergency preparedness because of its ability to provide backup power as well …
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This report provides two of the three deliverables for the Cost Benefit Analysis of Various Electric Reliability Improvement Projects from the End Users’ Perspective. One of the two deliverables included in this report is a Summary Analysis of the cost to customers (residential, commercial, and industrial) of extended outages provided by day of the week, each 4 day combination of weekday and weekends, and a week. The other deliverable is a section of Mitigating Measures which describes the types of costs incurred to avoid outages, reduce duration and restore power. The mitigating measures costs are also distinguished as capital or …
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