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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…

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…