Probabilistic Approach to Quantifying the Contribution of Variable Generation and Transmission to System Reliability: Preprint

Conference · Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2012

OSTI ID:1051159

Ibanez, Eduardo; Milligan, Michael

The increasing electrical load served by variable generation (VG), such as wind and solar energy, in the United States and many other countries has stimulated an interesting line of research to better quantify the capacity value of these resources. Methods applied traditionally to thermal units based on their average outage rates do not apply to VG because of their uncertain and non-dispatchablenature. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's Integration of Variable Generation Task Force recently released a report that highlighted the need to develop and benchmark underlying loss-of-load expectation and related metrics that reasonably and fairly calculate the contribution to planning reserves, or capacity value, of solar and wind power. As the fraction of generation comingfrom VG becomes more significant, their estimated capacity value will have a larger impact on system planning. In this paper, we provide a method to include VG in traditional probabilistic-based adequacy methods. This method has been implemented in the Renewable Energy Probabilistic Resource Assessment tool developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Through an example based on the U.S. Western Interconnection, this method is applied to assess the effect that transmission can have on resource adequacy. We also analyze the interactions between available transmission and capacity value for VG.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Wind and Water Technologies Office (EE-4W)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 1051159
• Report Number(s): NREL/CP-5500-56219
• Conference Information: Presented at the 11th Annual International Workshop on Large-Scale Integration of Wind Power into Power Systems as Well as on Transmission Networks for Offshore Wind Power Plants Conference, 13-15 November 2012, Lisbon, Portugal
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY
17 WIND ENERGY
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION
BENCHMARKS
CAPACITY
capacity value
METRICS
NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY
PLANNING
power system planning
POWER SYSTEMS
RELIABILITY
RESOURCE ASSESSMENT
SOLAR ENERGY
solar generation
system planning
transmission
WIND POWER
wind power generation
WIND POWER PLANTS