Wired for wind: Re-tuning the US grid

http://social.windenergyupdate.com/print/33332?utm_source=WEU+E-Br...

Wind Energy Update Published on Wind Energy Update (http://social.windenergyupdate.com)

Posted by [1] on Apr 20, 2012 After more than a century of running a system that Thomas Edison would still recognize, the addition of wind and other renewables to their energy portfolio is causing the operators of America's electricity grid to rethink how they manage this critical infrastructure and the power that it delivers. By Dan McCue In a melee shaped by Renewables Portfolio Standards, the volatility of the broader economy, and sector highs and lows, perhaps no single entity has grappled with that challenge more than the nations six independent system operators (ISO), who must carry out the smooth grid integration of renewables while maintaining system reliability down to the nanosecond. "It is a challenge," said Steven Greenlee, spokesman for the California ISO, which serves about 80 percent of the US state and currently incorporates 3,962 MW of wind and 601 MW of solar into its grid system. "The first thing you have to realize is this is an system that's going through a whole new evolution, and of course it has to be done very carefully, because electricity is a pure essence of the laws of physics," Greenlee said. "It does want it wants, and we just try to corral it as best we can," he said. The other huge challenge is the intermittent nature of wind itself. In California, base-load generation is fueled by natural gas and about 1,500 MW in geothermal capacity which, Greenlee explained, is "turned on, stays on and generates electricity at the same pace continually." For those unfamiliar with them, ISOs are regional entities formed at the recommendation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to manage the transmission system and the spot market for electricity in a given geographic area in real time, and to make continuous adjustments to electricity supply and demand. In practice, they exist to separate the players in the competitive generation sector from the natural monopoly functions of electricity and distribution. ISOs have also been established in Canada under the auspices of the North America Electric Reliability Corporation. Renewables, of course, are highly unpredictable. Wind can be blowing at 30 miles per hour for a period, then stop abruptly. In the case of solar, clouds can cover the sun unexpectedly, and even wind has an impact on solar reliability, because in dry climates, it tends to kick up sand. "In fact, we have studies that show we've seen generation drop on our grid by hundreds of

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Wired for wind: Re-tuning the US grid

http://social.windenergyupdate.com/print/33332?utm_source=WEU+E-Br...

megawatts within an hour or even less due to these factors," Greenlee said. As a result, the power flowing on the grid needs constant monitoring and attention, and the ISO needs to have flexible generation on hand to fill in the gaps. In California's case, that means natural gas, which can be started quickly and is easy to ramp up when wind farm output is down, and just as easy to ramp down when the wind starts blowing again. "And as you can imagine, the situation becomes an even bigger concern as more and more renewables come onto the grid," Greenlee said. Accurate forecasting Not surprisingly, such an effort would be nearly impossible without quality forecasting and monitoring tools. "The challenge, when you come right down to it, is that you're dealing with weather," said John Dumas, director of market operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, "Wind power is a function of wind speed, which in turn is a function of temperature and a lot of other factors. As a result, you're is constantly dispatching controllable generation to deal with the variation of load." To make the task doable, ERCOT, which has 9,838 MW of installed wind capacity, relies on load forecasting vendors who take weather data -- including wind speed forecasts -- match it with other known factors in the market, and convert it into a demand forecast. "We plan our generation around that forecast, but of course, we always carry enough reserve power to take care of the errors you'd normally expect to see in a weather-related forecast," Dumas said. "If you're talking about 60,000 MW of demand and there's a three percent error in the forecast, that's 1,800 MW that you've got to adjust for." "In other words, you have to be able to forecast the power coming into your system, you have to dispatch it, and you have account for any negative loads through reserves," he continued. "It's pretty basic. And while we rely on vendors for these forecasts, the main thing is learning and refining your processes through experience." Among the most well known of the vendors in the space is Enbala Power Network, which builds, sells and operates load management programs. It does this by recognizing the many loads industrial or commercial customers, for instance - have an inherent flexibility in how they consumer power. It then captures these bits of flexibility, aggregates them, and then offers them as a controllable resource for the ISO. One of its customers is PJM, a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of whole sale electricity in all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia. "The best way I can describe what we do is that we offer an integrated system through which they can ensure that power system supply and demand is equal all the time," said Ron Dizy, Enbala's CEO. "That a tremendous challenge for these companies because the power system is quite complex and difficult to model accurately," Dizy said. "The devil is in the details, and if you don't model accurately you can really have problems." Some grid operators have responded to the uncertainty of renewable intermittency by opting for

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2012-04-24 14:17

Wired for wind: Re-tuning the US grid

http://social.windenergyupdate.com/print/33332?utm_source=WEU+E-Br...

a strategy of geographic diversity for generating assets, assuming the wind will never stop blowing in every place a wind farm is located. But while that approach might resolve some problems, it doesn't address the fact that many wind energy facilities are largely unmanned or unable to respond quickly to emergency conditions on the grid. In response, Southwest Power Pool Inc., an ISO headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas that has about 3,817 MW of wind capacity, implemented a five-minute energy imbalance market, which has greatly improved the short-term integration of the excess renewable generation on a given system. This has largely relieved the needed regulation requirements for balancing, said SPP spokesman Pete Hoelscher said. Other ISOs have moved to day-ahead markets and are using improved wind forecasting tools, thereby enhancing their flexibility. That is helping them to make better economic unit commitment decisions. SPP will go live with its own day-ahead market in March 2015. Leading the pack But as one familiar with renewable development in the US might suspect, few have done as much as California to address the challenge of integrating wind to the grid. Fifteen months ago it opened a state-of-the-art control center packed with the latest grid management technology. Its most singular asset is an 80-foot long, seven-foot high monitor in the main control room that operators can quickly look to for real time system information. "The idea is that through the visualizations on the screen, operators can quickly grasp what's going on without having to sift through all kinds of manually assembled data," Greenlee said. "Speed is everything in managing the grid," he continued, adding, "Along with that, California is the first ISO, and the still the only one that I know of, that has a dedicated renewables dispatch desk manned by an operator solely responsible for managing the output of renewable assets." The California ISO also employers Synchrophasers, synchronized phasor measurement devices that are deployed across the grid to provide real-time assessments of electrical quantities across the power system. "While these are widely used in the industry, we found that by tweaking them and adding some new functionality, these devices can take snapshots of the grid about 33 times per second, greatly enhancing the speed of our responses," Greenlee said. On the weather front, California challenged vendors to improve and provide more depth to forecasts provided to the ISO, a process that resulted in a 20 percent improvement in forecast reliability. Slow road ahead But as much as the California ISO has done in this regard, it and other independent system operators are still confronted by one additional challenge to wind integration in the grid that they

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Wired for wind: Re-tuning the US grid

http://social.windenergyupdate.com/print/33332?utm_source=WEU+E-Br...

haven't overcome: the time it takes to complete wind farm projects. In California and many other US states, Renewables Portfolio Standards require utilities to have as much as 33 percent of their sales met by renewable sources of energy by 2020 - just eight years away. The problem is that it takes five to seven years to build wind facilities in the US, with creation of the transmission infrastructure taking the longest time to put in place. "So we do have some urgency," Greenlee said. Even California's approval process for a new wind farm is decidedly lengthy. Once a proposal is made and given the blessing of the California Energy Commission, the California ISO conducts a thorough review that takes about 15 months. Having passed the ISO's muster, it has to go for various other state approvals, including one from the California Public Utilities Commission for the sitting of transmission lines, which can take "months or more," Greenlee said. "We have two processes for how we deal with adding assets to the grid," he said. "One is a transmission planning process, the other is a generation interconnection request process." The good news in California is the ISO is on the verge of completing an 18-month stakeholder process that will lead to a merging of some these distinct processes and a closer alignment of others. "This will lead to a much tighter and more holistic planning process," Greenlee said. If the process still seems like it could be a bit much in a situation where time is of the essence, Greenlee provided an explanation for why it is not. "The point is to take a hard look at what would happen when a particular new generator comes on line," he said. "Among the factors we look at is whether the existing transmission system can handle the increase in energy these plants would produce. If we think they can't, then we have to consider what we need to do to accommodate that generation." "Of course, we only approve those projects we need," Greenlee added. "We want to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency that we can out of these facilities, because ultimately, that keeps costs lower for everybody." "And, of course, we don't want to overbuild and have stranded investments," he said. To respond to this article, please write to the Editor: Rikki Stancich Image credit: Sura Nualpradid
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