While this number is lower than some other similar industrial countries, it is a formidable amount of generation that operates with a different paradigm than the traditional prime-mover-powered generator sources. That generation technology usually involves a source of power, such as water or steam, that spins a turbine that turns a generator. These power generators have a large amount of mechanical inertia, as there is a lot of mass spinning at a constant and reasonably stable speed, even as daily loads vary. In much of the U.S. grid, the variation in the frequency of voltage is between 59.95 Hz and 60.05 Hz, which is less than 0.1%. Many renewable-power sources are referred to as distributed-energy resources (DER) and are often connected to the grid at the distribution level. About a decade ago, I raised a question to the experts in the IEEE PQ Subcommittee meeting: Will the increase in DERs result in an increase or decrease in the power quality in the immediate area of the electrical distribution network? The answers were "yes," "no" and "it depends."
展开▼
