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Power grid resource adequacy can be difficult to ensure with high penetrations of intermittent renewable energy. We explore enhancing resource adequacy by overbuilding renewables while modeling statistical correlations in renewable power at different sites. Overbuilding allows production during times of low power, and exploiting statistical correlations can reduce power variability and, subsequently, reduce needed renewable capacity. In this work, we present a stochastic optimization problem to size renewables and expand transmission while minimizing the expected dispatch cost. Our method uses statistical profiles of renewable production and embeds network constraints using the DC power flow equations. We assess our method’s effects on feasibility, load shedding, locational marginal prices, and generator curtailment. On the IEEE 9-bus system, we found that anti-correlation between generators reduced generation capacity needs with sufficient transmission. On the IEEE 30-bus system, we found that the optimal solution required significant overbuilding and curtailment of renewables regardless of the marginal cost of schedulable generation.
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Hydropower Replacement and the Nexus of Food-Energy-Water Systems: Impacts on Climate Performance
The nexus of food, energy, and water systems offers a meaningful lens to evaluate hydroelectric dam removal decisions. Maintaining adequate power supplies and flourishing fish populations hangs on the balance of managing the tradeoffs of water resource management. Aside from energy adequacy, substituting hydropower with other renewable energy sources impacts the overall energy dispatch behavior of the grid, including emissions of existing fossil fuels. This study extends earlier work in the literature to evaluate the adequacy impact to the power supply by removing four Lower Snake River dams in the Columbia River Basin in favor of supporting migratory salmon populations. The authors explore the climate performance, i.e., fossil fuel dispatch changes, of simulated renewable substitution portfolios to supplement performance metrics alongside adequacy and initial investment metrics. The study finds that including the climate metric greatly influences the favorability of some alternative portfolios that would otherwise be overlooked, with some portfolios improving climate mitigation efforts by reducing emissions over the baseline scenario. The contribution is in advancing a straightforward and supplementary climate performance method that can accompany any energy portfolio analysis.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1804560
- PAR ID:
- 10334066
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 344 to 348
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEM50564.2021.9672812
