Rapid integration of renewable energy beckons new perspectives towards planning and operations of generation assets.
How can power producers avoid inefficiencies in fuel consumption and operating costs? How can ratepayers avoid being at the mercy of price spikes and grid instability?
By moving towards shorter dispatch timeframes.
Traditional, 1-hour timeframes in planning gives a false sense of future capacity requirement as dynamic parameters are not valued properly. Research has shown that when markets move to 5-minute timeframes, combustion engines respond extremely well to voltage and frequency fluctuations, and enable generation players to capture price spikes in the real-time market.
Regulatory incentives to update planning and operational models will enable power systems to account for real-time variability in high renewable systems of the future.
If the energy sector wants to decarbonise, change is needed. Production from renewable energy sources like wind and solar fluctuate continually, which means the established way of using one-hour time resolution for intraday markets just isn’t fast enough. Shortening the time resolution and gate closure times to 15 or even 5 minutes would make it easier to match supply and demand. The result would be better planning, less need for reserves, and lower costs.
Electrical power systems are rapidly transitioning from generation based on conventional synchronous thermal power, such as coal, nuclear, and combined cycle gas turbines, to generation mainly based on new inverter-based renewable energy sources. To ensure stability and reliability of global power systems during and after this transition, a redesign of the power system and its operation philosophy is required. The redesign must address certain stability challenges.
US electric utilities could be missing out on millions in value for their customers by using outdated grid modelling techniques. This whitepaper published in collaboration with Reuters quantifies and calculates the value of flexibility is in a power system and shows that commonly used methodologies for grid planning in the US may result in sub-optimal outcomes for ratepayers.
