NERC Identifies Solutions to Address the Grid Reliability Challenges of a Transition to Clean Energy

A recent assessment of the reliability impacts of climate change initiatives paints an encouraging picture of how resources in the pipeline can help enable a major transition to a low carbon economy.  The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC) makes clear that reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of the power sector to meet the carbon mitigation levels consistent with climate science requires a fundamental shift in North America’s resource mix. However, through demand side resources, resource aggregation, energy storage and other strategies we can effectively manage that transition. NERC’s report doesn’t understate the scale of the challenge implied in this huge shift, but it also makes clear we have a broad set of tools at our disposal for getting the job done.

While there are some outstanding issues that need to be addressed, it’s clear that the most pressing reliability challenges will not arise until the 2020-2030+ timeframe. As carbon prices cause increasing numbers of fossil units to retire post-2020, new technologies will be needed to provide low carbon power and manage the variability from renewables:

Large-scale deployment of variable generation will require increased system flexibility to counter its uncertainty and variability. Some potential resources include transmission to support transactions, energy sources from other locations, and technologies that can provide additional system flexibility such as Demand Response, simple-cycle gas turbines, energy storage, transmission, etc.

The good news is that the technologies needed to produce and integrate low carbon power, including compressed air energy storage, dynamic thermal circuit rating, and carbon capture and storage have already overcome significant initial technology risk hurdles through demonstration projects, pilot plants and commercial deployment. Despite uncertainties associated with nascent technologies (e.g. electrochemical storage for transport applications), NERC’s reliability assessment makes it clear that we have a wide variety of technologies to produce low carbon electricity and a broad portfolio of enabling technologies to integrate them into the grid.

The only thing we lack is the political will to get it done.