Current Challenges In Planning Renewable Integration: Gap Analysis Suggested Remediation Strategies

摘要

The integration of large amounts of renewable resources has the potential to impact the reliability on the US electric system as a whole - both at the transmission and distribution levels. To maintain the reliability of the system, effective coordination is needed among various key decision makers to ensure that reliability issues are documented and well understood. Because renewable penetration is rapidly expanding at the distribution level, close interaction between the system operators/planners and their distribution counterparts is required for smooth end-to-end operation. This coordination can be better achieved by effective, coordinated planning and accurate forecasting of the needs of the system with renewables. To be effective, planning models will need to address bidirectional power flow impacts between transmission and distribution, emission targets, demand response, load following, ramp rates, transient response for frequency and other items. The purpose of this paper is identify the planning and forecasting tools which are in place for grid planning and operations today and identify the gaps in the tools that need to be addressed. Also this paper will suggest approaches to address these gaps and identifies any new tools or integration of tools that can be considered by the industry.