Marcelino Madrigal - Böcker

In their efforts to increase the share of renewable in electricity grids to reducing emissions or increasing energy diversity, developed and developing countries are finding that a considerable scale-up of investments in transmission infrastructures will be necessary to achieve their goals. Renewable energy resources such as wind, solar, and hydro power, tend to be sited far from existing electricity grids and consumption centers. Achieving desired supply levels from these sources requires that networks be expanded to reach many sites and to ensuring the different supply variation patterns of renewable are combined with existing sources in the grid to ensure the constantly varying demand for electricity is always met. Expanding networks will be crucial to achieve renewable energy objectives efficiency and effectively. Efficiency is important to ensure renewable energy goals are achieved at the lowest cost while considering needed investment in transmission. Besides the cost of transmission, which is often worth, transmission needs be planned and built in such a way that the many sites being taped are connected in a timely fashion. The challenges of ensuring efficiency and efficacy in developing transmission for renewable become surmountable if the right planning and regulatory framework for expanding transmission are put in place. This report reviews emerging approaches being undertaken by transmission utilities and regulators to solve to cope with these challenges of expanding transmission for renewable energy scale-up. Proactively planning and regulating transmission networks are emerging as the premier approach to ensure that transmission networks are expanded efficiently and effectively. Linking planning with clear and stable cost-recovery regulation can also help bringing the private sector to complement the considerable investment needs in transmission. Based on the evolving experience and on established theory and practice on transmission regulation, the report also proposes some principles that could be useful to implement specific rules for the planning, development, and pricing of transmission networks.

The paper ‘Challenges and Approaches to Electricity Grids Operations and Planning with Increased Amounts of Variable Renewable Generation: Emerging Lessons from Selected Operational Experiences and Desktop Studies’ focuses on analysing the impacts of variable renewable energy on the operation and planning of the power system (mostly, generation system). It is aimed at informing stakeholders in power utilities, regulatory bodies and other relevant audiences, on the fundamentals of technical challenges and approaches to operate electricity grids with renewable energy. It covers renewable energy as a whole, but in particular, focusses on wind and solar energy. It also presents three case studies of countries, including China, Germany and Spain. The total worldwide installed capacity of wind and solar projects is growing rapidly, and several countries are noticing increased penetrations of wind and solar in their electricity generation mix. In addition to operating experience being gained from adding wind and solar capacity, several grid integration studies have been performed that assess potential grid and operating impacts from adding higher amounts of wind and solar capacity. Perhaps just as important, the electric power industry and those that conduct research on grid integration have not found a maximum level of variable generation that can be reliably incorporated, and it is clear that it is as much an economic question (how much cost in additional reserves or grid impacts is acceptable) as a technical question regarding grid operators’ ability to adapt to the new challenges. In addition, while their contributions to capacity or “firm” power and associated costs are different from those of conventional power sources, variable renewable generation technologies can contribute to long-term system adequacy and security. The paper describes on the contribution of variable power sources to long-term supply adequacy requirements, i.e. how much sources like wind and solar power contribute to “firm supply” in a system. It also describes methods to find out to what extent they contribute and at what cost. It also aims at providing indicative answers to how costs to system operations be determined and when and how an integration study be done to estimate the short-term reserve costs of renewable energy. The concepts in the paper should be of interest, especially to grid planers. For grid operators, the paper summarizes a menu of strategies that the operational practices and desktop research tell about managing wind in a system at different levels of penetration. It also elucidates available strategies, amongst other crucial questions of operational impacts and challenges that operators need to be aware of, to integrate variable generation.

Smart grids are for everyone but require the vision and investment plans for grid modernization. This document provides some practical elements on how to develop a smart grid vision and investment plan with a focus on the distribution side and also briefly discusses finance and regulatory issues.