News & Blog

China sets aggressive goals to develop high penetration of renewable energy but also suffers from the large scale of curtailment due to the lack of power system flexibility. The electric power, gas, and heat systems work on different but complementary time and space scales. Multiple energy systems (MES) increase the efficiency and flexibility of both…

Renewable resources that are variable will continue being deployed on the bulk power system and in wholesale markets. Between existing financial incentives (aka subsidies), enormous technological advances, cost reductions, state mandates, and consumer demand for lower or zero emitting resources, variable resources in the form of wind and solar are here to stay and will…

ERCOT runs its Security-Constrained Economic Dispatch (SCED) every five minutes and sends resulting targeted output levels for the next five-minute dispatch interval to each generator. This set of output levels results in the most economic generation being used to serve the expected generation requirement, taking into account the operating characteristics of the generation units, the…

How we got here You’ve come a long way, baby!  That’s how I feel sometimes when I think about the early days of the Utility Wind Interest Group (UWIG).  We started UWIG in 1989 with six US utilities, and now we are the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) with 180 members from around the world!…

The electric grid as we know it is changing. The generating resource mix is shifting with the retirement of natural gas, coal and nuclear plants combined with the introduction of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants. With these changes come changes in the technology deployed on the bulk power…

The operation of power systems with high shares of wind and solar energy requires reliable tools to facilitate a secure grid and market integration. For over 15 years many firms and research institutes around the world have been developing and operating forecast systems to capture the weather-dependent variability in the power production of a huge…

The Energy Web Foundation is supporting the commercial implementation of blockchain applications that promote investments in clean, secure, and reliable electricity systems worldwide. Blockchain technology—the technology underpinning Bitcoin, Ethereum, and numerous other digital currencies— has the potential to profoundly transform the energy sector. Specifically, we believe blockchain will redesign the rules of the game on…

In a perfect world, grid-connected energy storage plants might never make sense. The diversity and inherent flexibility of thousands of generators and loads in a large power system should provide all the flexibility that we could need to continuously match supply and demand at a very low cost, even with variable renewables dominating our generation…

It was 28th October 2017, a stormy autumn day in Germany. Strong winds in the evening led to high wind power production across Germany. During the same time, power demand decreased as people retired to bed. Conventional power plants were however still running because of their inflexibility. All this made the wholesale power market price…

A new FERC order, while ostensibly addressing energy storage resources, actually provides an important opportunity to create a universal data model for all grid resources. The traditional way of looking at generators and loads is no longer sufficient. We should take advantage of this opportunity. FERC Order 841 requires electricity markets to create an energy…