News & Blog

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…

(Updated: February 10, 2021) The increase in levels of inverter-based resources (IBRs) is changing the dynamic performance of power grids around the world that were historically dominated by the characteristic performance of synchronous generators. Recent events in southern California have highlighted this change, for example, the 2017 Blue Cut Fire which resulted in the loss…

Renewable energy forecasts are important tools for utilities and system operators to predict power output and total production for weather-driven generation sources such as solar and wind. However, validation and analysis of these forecasts are typically done using ad hoc methods built by either forecast providers or end users, and are often proprietary, not transparent,…

As mentioned in Part 1 of this blog, one cannot define the impact of distributed energy resources (DERs) without some form of assessment or study that can qualitatively or quantitatively provide a technical basis for that determination. Increasing levels of DERs will have a notable impact on BPS planning, operations, and performance during normal and…

Ask any grid operator their top priority and the answer is simple: reliability. Our society has come to expect, and require, uninterrupted power—even on the hottest days and coldest nights, and through the longest storms. These expectations do not change even as the grid transitions to high variable renewable energy (VRE); reliability remains paramount. With…

I am often asked, “what threshold should the industry use for defining when distributed energy resources (DERs) have an impact on the bulk power system (BPS)?” This usually has a trailing explanation about how defining a threshold for impact will help entities know when to require data collection for modeling DERs in reliability studies and…

Inverter-based technology is fast becoming the dominant type of technology in many smaller island power systems and in pockets of very large power systems. Today, inverter-based resources (IBRs) comprise the majority of most interconnection queues for new resources, a trend that shows little sign of reversing. This trend is raising critical questions about the capability…

Rising levels of inverter-based resources (IBRs) create a need for new approaches to modelling for the power grid, for both operational and planning purposes. Examples of such shifts in modelling approaches are occurring for some regions of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) power system, as the need to understand and address unknowns before events occur…

Customer-sited renewable resources offer tremendous promise for lowering costs, improving reliability, and reducing carbon footprint on the electric grid. But operators struggle to take advantage of the various forms of flexibility, having found it challenging to get multiple resources and increasingly complex systems to work well together. A distributed control environment, in which some assets…