News & Blog

About The Series: ESIG members play many different kinds of roles in energy systems integration and have followed unique paths to their current positions. This “Career Perspectives” blog series taps into the diversity of experiences and perspectives of ESIG members through interviews that explore their educational backgrounds, career trajectories, key decision points, and mentorship experiences,…

Some time ago I was asked by an energy commissioner to provide an estimate of how much the forecasting accuracy has improved over the past two decades, and what accuracy level she could expect in her area. When asked such a question, it’s comparable to being asked, what is the ideal place to go on…

Utility planning has become increasingly complex. The power system has always been inherently interactive, but new technologies, an increasingly dynamic distribution system, and resource variability have made it more so. We have begun to think more holistically about generation, transmission, and distribution. For example, non-wires alternatives such as distributed storage may replace the need for…

Any time you happen to glance at the electricity mix in the United States you will notice a significant transition taking place. Wind and solar power plants are being constructed and activated at an ever-increasing rate. In fact, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), in the next three years the United States could…

Over 100 years ago, DC technology lost the “war of the currents” to AC technology because its proponents failed to find a feasible way to change voltage levels. Since then, the power grid, including both transmission and distribution, has been established based on AC technology. However, the rapid growth of high-tech industry and renewable energy…

How technology, policy, and leadership can leverage the grid to rapidly turn the curve on emissions reductions The development of a widespread, reliable electricity grid has enabled a way of life that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. It is without question one of the all time, standout success stories for technology and engineering.…

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…