News & Blog

A goal of competitive wholesale markets is to be efficient both in the short-run, by ensuring that resources are dispatched to minimize production costs while maintaining secure operations, and in the long-run, by ensuring that market prices help to coordinate investment in new generation or the orderly retirement of resources that are no longer competitive.…

Introduction China’s urbanization rate increased from 36% in 2000 to 60% in 2019. With the rapid growth of urbanization, the efficiency of the centralized energy supply is receiving increasing attention. It becomes more important to coordinate different energy sectors, i.e., electricity, heating, cooling, and gas systems to increase the overall energy efficiency. With the development…

Why have grid-forming inverters become a hot topic? High penetration of renewable energy, mainly from wind and photovoltaics (PV), has been associated with a major shift in power source connections. The shift has been from power sources being connected to the power systems directly using synchronous generators, to connections via solid state inverters, introducing inverter-based…

AC/DC is not only a rock band of repute with countless classics under their belt, but it was also the topic of the great current war between Tesla and Edison. Both approaches, however, required the presence of a rotating machine, inside which the friendly properties described by Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, and Lenz meshed together to…

Capacity markets are used in some wholesale electricity markets to pay resources for being available to meet peak electricity demand. Capacity is not actual electricity, but rather the ability to produce electricity when called upon several years in the future. Capacity market payments cover some or all of the fixed costs of building and maintaining…

The November 2018 ESIG blog on “Implementation of Inertia Monitoring in ERCOT – What’s It All About?” discussed the importance of synchronous inertia for a power system.  It included the impacts of inverter-based resources on system inertia, and an inertia monitoring tool that ERCOT implemented to track system inertia in real time, forecast it for…

Utilities are increasingly seeking to impose additional integration charges on wind and solar generators to compensate for variability and uncertainty. Renewable Reserve Sharing Groups may provide a way to help reduce or eliminate those charges. There are two distinct ways that wind and solar generation can impact utility balancing requirements: Minute-to-minute variability of wind and…

Introduction As the growth of inverter-based resources (IBRs), such as photovoltaic, wind energy, and batteries, increases in order to decrease the carbon footprint of energy sources, utility protection engineers increasingly ask the question: “Are the protection systems installed at present capable of protecting power systems with a high penetration of IBRs?” Before we can answer…

Australia’s energy system is transforming at a pace and magnitude not previously seen or imagined. The disruption facing power systems across the globe is accelerated in Australia, as an electrically islanded nation. Indeed, by many metrics, change is happening faster in Australia than in almost all other developed economies, and it’s occurring in a physical…

This is part 2 of a two-part blog articulating the view of Jonathan O’Sullivan of the Eirgrid Group, which has TSO responsibilities for the systems of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  The view encompasses how the industry evolved to its current state, and where it needs to go from here to satisfy the goals and needs…