This project aims a practical deployment of its system, which will have far-reaching national and international impacts. The system operators will be able to determine the potential future reliability impacts of solar resources, other renewables and sources of uncertainty on the system reliability, their probability and timing, as well as the corrective actions needed to minimize the risk (e.g. in terms of balancing capacity, ramping capability, and transmission system limits). Moreover, the uncertainty and variability information will be fed directly into the unit commitment and dispatch procedures, so that the system will be automatically positioned to address potential system imbalances and transmission violations. Although the project is located in California, it will have a profound impact on the rest of the country. The toolbox developed and perfected in this project will be made available for utilities and system operators across the country, and the California experience and know-how will be widely disseminated. Ultimately, this project will significantly contribute to the EERE SunShot objective “to support the development of innovative, cost-effective solutions to boost the amount of solar energy that utilities can integrate seamlessly with the national power grid”. This effort will advance previous research efforts at PNNL and test its integration capabilities with operational tools in use at the California ISO.
The collective consideration of all sources intermittency distributed over a wide area unified with the comprehensive evaluation of various elements of balancing process, i.e. capacity, ramping, and energy requirements, will help system operators more robustly and effectively balance generation against load and interchange to ultimately provide for more solar and other renewable resources on the grid, without compromising reliability and control performance. The need for the proactive integration of uncertainty information into system operations and probabilistic close-loop controls is widely recognized, but rarely implemented in real systems. This project leads toward a practical deployment of such systems in California. The project will help system operators clearly identify the potential future reliability impacts of solar resources and other renewables as well as all other concurrent sources of uncertainty on system reliability, including an assessment of potential adverse impacts, their probability and timing, and the recommended corrective actions needed to minimize risk by adding more flexible balancing capacity, ramping capability, and/or adjusting transmission limits.