Grid Integration and the Carrying Capacity of the U.S. Grid to Incorporate Variable Renewable Energy

Cochran, Jaquelin¹  Denholm, Paul¹  Speer, Bethany¹  Miller, Mackay¹ 

[1] National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

关键词: FLEXIBILITY;    RENEWABLE ENERGY;    GENERATION;    INTEGRATION;    POWER SYSTEMS;    OPERATION;    GRID INTEGRATION;    ECONOMIC CARRYING CAPACITY;    RENEWABLE ENERGY PENETRATION;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1215010
RP-ID  :  NREL/TP--6A20-62607
PID  :  OSTI ID: 1215010

学科分类：电力

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

In the United States and elsewhere, renewable energy (RE) generation supplies an increasingly large percentage of annual demand, including nine U.S. states where wind comprised over 10% of in-state generation in 2013. This white paper summarizes the challenges to integrating increasing amounts of variable RE, identifies emerging practices in power system planning and operation that can facilitate grid integration, and proposes a unifying concept???economic carrying capacity???that can provide a framework for evaluating actions to accommodate higher penetrations of RE. There is growing recognition that while technical challenges to variable RE integration are real, they can generally be addressed via a variety of solutions that vary in implementation cost. As a result, limits to RE penetration are primarily economic, driven by factors that include transmission and the flexibility of the power grid to balance supply and demand. This limit can be expressed as economic carrying capacity, or the point at which variable RE is no longer economically competitive or desirable to the system or society.