News & Blog

The buzzed-about summer series from Netflix “Stranger Things” depicts a fictional and highly secretive Department of Energy national laboratory unleashing a monster from another dimension on an unsuspecting Indiana town. It caused a lot of stress. But as my DOE colleague blogged, national laboratory researchers aren’t actually evil. In fact, a lot of us at…

Large renewable generating facilities – especially wind and solar – have been full-fledged citizens of the bulk electric system (BES) in the U.S. for almost two decades now.  The process toward achieving this status has been steady but full of challenges. The initial hurdles of characterizing and then capturing the steady-state and dynamic behavior of…

Modern wholesale electricity markets are quite good at optimizing the variable costs of energy supply within the physical limits of the grid. But if that is not complex enough for your tastes, there are always the industry issues around capacity adequacy! Market operators optimize the use of installed capacity resources by minimizing the cost to…

Many of you may have noticed a growing cacophony of worries, pronouncements, notices, studies, postings, workshops and even cave paintings (just kidding) related to “frequency response” of late.  Certainly this author has added to the racket. So what is the bemused observer to make of all of this? Well, here’s nub of the biscuit.  Everybody…

Increasing build-out of wind and solar power is raising a lot of concern and complaints among conventional power producers. Wind and solar come to electricity markets with zero marginal costs, depressing the prices and reducing the operating times of gas and coal power plants. This is making the business case unbearable. Many power plants are…

With more than 350 power plants, 8,600 miles of high voltage transmission lines, and more than seven million electricity customers, running the six-state regional grid is a continuous balancing act. Therefore, dispatching power resources to reliably serve electricity demand is one of the most critical tasks in electric power system operations. But doing this efficiently…