Grid Integration and the Carrying Capacity of the U.S. Grid to Incorporate Variable Renewable Energy
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
In the United States and elsewhere, renewable energy (RE) generation supplies an increasingly large percentage of annual demand, including nine U.S. states where wind comprised over 10% of in-state generation in 2013. This white paper summarizes the challenges to integrating increasing amounts of variable RE, identifies emerging practices in power system planning and operation that can facilitate grid integration, and proposes a unifying concept—economic carrying capacity—that can provide a framework for evaluating actions to accommodate higher penetrations of RE. There is growing recognition that while technical challenges to variable RE integration are real, they can generally be addressed via a variety of solutions that vary in implementation cost. As a result, limits to RE penetration are primarily economic, driven by factors that include transmission and the flexibility of the power grid to balance supply and demand. This limit can be expressed as economic carrying capacity, or the point at which variable RE is no longer economically competitive or desirable to the system or society.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1215010
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/TP-6A20-62607
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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