News & Blog

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is the system operator for most of Texas. The ERCOT Interconnection is an electric island grid with limited Direct Current (DC) Tie connections to the Mexican and Eastern US Interconnections. ERCOT today has more than 22 GW of installed wind and roughly 2 GW of utility-scale solar and…

Early proponents of the hydrogen economy encountered an intractable two-part problem: The cheapest source of hydrogen is natural gas, which leaves a carbon footprint larger than using natural gas directly; and Producing hydrogen from electricity is expensive and not terribly efficient. These points are made in Joseph Romm’s book The Hype About Hydrogen (2005) and are probably responsible for the trope: “Hydrogen…

The importance of flexibility As the power system continues to evolve, with wind and solar generation playing an ever-greater role, we hear more and more about the importance of increasing its flexibility. The IEA considers flexibility a global priority, and addressed its May, 2019 report on the status of the power system on policy and…

Power systems are undergoing a rapid change in generation mix due to the growth of inverter-based resources (IBRs) such as wind, solar, and battery energy storage.  The dynamic behavior of the Bulk Power System (BPS) that has typically been driven by synchronous machines is increasingly influenced or even largely determined by IBRs.  Stability challenges related…

As solar energy becomes a bigger part of the generation mix, grid operators need better visibility of how much solar power the system is producing. Then they can optimally dispatch solar and other energy sources to balance the generation and demand. Improving solar forecasts will allow the electric grid to be more flexible and adapt…