The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2015 Wind Vision study analyzed an ambitious scenario in which wind power served more than a third of U.S. electricity consumption in 2050 and showed the potential for wind energy to provide substantial health, environmental, and economic benefits. 

Attend this no-cost webinar to learn how analysts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) used a higher-fidelity modeling framework to build on the Wind Vision study by assessing the operational feasibility of a similar high wind future in the western United States. 

In this webinar, Gregory Brinkman of NREL and his colleagues will present the results and implications of their recent analysis, which found that: 

• Effective power system operation can be achieved with annual wind penetrations greater than 35%. 
• Renewable curtailment can be mitigated by transmission expansion. And, reducing curtailment effectively reduces generation costs and carbon dioxide emissions. 
• Suboptimal transmission flows show the importance of real-time balancing on reducing costs and curtailment.