News & Blog

The energy transition has impacts on communities as well as on power systems. This blog reflects a community impact view, illustrated with the ongoing transition in Ireland. Energy transition implies many changes: fewer fossil fuels, more renewable energy, infrastructural changes for energy production, transmission, and storage. All these changes impact our society and have real…

It has been fascinating to follow system operators’ ways of managing increasing shares of wind and solar energy. From initial reactions of “we will reach a limit of wind energy in our system at less than 10 percent share,” the bold and the brave are now preparing operational practices to deal with close to 100…

Achieving high levels of renewable integration is technically feasible—however, economic impacts vary dramatically depending on policies, regulations, investments, and many other issues that present hard choices. Objective analyses of the trade-offs often rely on market studies using production cost modeling (PCM) to perform cost/benefit analyses of future scenarios and to compare likely impacts of alternative…

The notion of a macrogrid has been steadily moving into discussions of reliability, resilience, and renewables in US and world-wide power grids. A search on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Xplore search engine using keywords “macrogrid” and “microgrid” resulted in 40 publications, all of which used the term macrogrid to refer to…

I don’t think I state anything controversial when I say that the energy sector is weather- and climate-dependent. Both day-to-day weather and longer-term climate variability have impacts on supply, demand, transport and distribution, and energy markets. This is exemplified in Figure 1. However, what is becoming ever more critical is an appreciation, and ultimately a…