As we scale up capacity, how do we effectively integrate renewable energy resources into the grid?

The journey towards net zero is well underway.

More and more renewable energy resources are being utilised to power the homes and industries of the globe and impressive innovation has helped to scale up capacity at an ever-increasing rate. To make the most of this progress, important infrastructure planning must be conducted to successfully incorporate variable renewable energy (RE) resources into the grid in a reliable and consistent manner.

Building confidence amongst politicians, investors and consumers is vital to reinforce the progress being made to divert away from traditional high carbon energy resources.

While RE is preferable to GHG emitting fossil fuel power stations, the grid faces a number of challenges to properly calculate and distribute energy output from renewable sources.

The first problem is how to build an accurate picture of how much energy is generated at a given time compared to how much is expected and how to make up this shortfall. Due to the intermittent nature of energy sources like wind and solar, this problem becomes increasingly important as RE achieves a high penetration on the grid. For example, wind energy is more readily available in the winter whereas solar energy is most efficient in the long daylight hours of summer.

Compounding this problem is the rising number of behind the meter energy solutions being employed by both residential and commercial properties. The rapidly increasing availability of PV solar panels and small wind turbines means that homes and companies are turning to their own means of production to meet most or part of their energy needs.

This makes forecasting increasingly difficult for Energy companies as they try to calculate how much energy needs to be available at a given time. An efficient relationship is required to account for local, distributed energy and utility scale generation that makes up the bulk of the power available on the grid.

To allow for the many variables involved, comprehensive grid integration studies are required. These studies establish where and how much to ramp up generation and transmission capacity to help build confidence amongst investors and the will of policy makers to get behind an increasingly RE dominant grid. The complex analyses required in the studies covers RE resource data, load data and forecast data to build a comprehensive picture that accounts for how much energy is going to be available, where and when it is needed and how much reserve is needed to account for shortfall.

Data on transmission is also fundamental to prioritising the necessary infrastructure to connect RE resources to the grid. Wind farms like Hornsea 1 in the North Sea (the world’s largest wind farm) are located far away from the final destination of the energy that they produce and require connection to the mainland. Technologies such as innovative interconnectors are playing a vital role in upgrading and sharing capacity between the UK and Europe.

Storage solutions are also going to play a vital role in reinforcing a grid that relies more upon RE than high carbon resources. Because of the variable nature of these resources, storage solutions must be able to be relied upon to step in when production rates are high and demand is low, and to redistribute this energy when demand outstrips production.

What we are leaning is that in order to make an effective transition from fossil fuels to RE, planning is required to seamlessly integrate these sources into a system that is used to relying upon resources that have little variability in availability. Confidence is key to ensure that all stakeholders stay on board and that damaging myths about RE are dispelled. Planning is vital to make sure that the right technology is employed at the necessary locations all over the grid, to create a system that is resilient and reliable.

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