Renewable Electricity and the Grid | Date: 28 April 2011, 06:52
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The variability of power output exhibited by many renewable electricity
sources represents something of a challenge to maintaining secure supplies in
the integrated electricity systems of industrialized countries – especially if, as
widely anticipated, the contribution of renewables to national grids rises to
very substantial levels. But is this a major – or even an insuperable – challenge,
or one that is readily amenable to solution? This is the key question this book
attempts to address. It also raises a host of other important issues.
How do electricity systems currently cope with the hourly, daily and
seasonal variability of demand, and with the sudden interruptions to supply
that occasionally occur, for example due to the failure of a major conventional
power plant? Are renewable sources ‘intermittent’, or is it more accurate to
describe them as ‘variable’?
How much ‘dispatchable’ generating capacity (fossil-fuelled or renewable)
is required to provide supplementary ‘backup’ power for variable renewables?
And how should ‘backup’ be defined? Is it principally for power, to provide
short-term control of grid frequency; or is it principally for energy, to contribute
to annual supply or long-term supply reserve requirements? To what
extent can variable renewables such as wind contribute to ‘firm power’ and be
accorded a ‘capacity credit’; and how does such capacity credit vary with the
proportion of renewables in the system?
How much backup capacity already exists on conventional electricity
systems, and how much more will need to be added as the proportion of variable
renewables increases? How much are these backup supplies likely to cost?
What kinds of backup supplies will be required in the renewables-intensive
electricity systems of the future? To what extent can existing backup supplies
be adapted to cope with a greater contribution from renewables? Are new,
more flexible, forms of generation required? And what role might there be for
various storage technologies, both existing and emerging?
What is the potential role of wind power forecasting, over the short and
medium term, in enabling electricity system operators to adjust the output of
other power sources to match the variability of wind? To what extent can the
variability of wind be mitigated in future by contributions from other renewables,
such as wave or tidal power? And to what extent could wide
geographical dispersal, across the UK and over the rest of Europe, reduce the
overall variability of renewable sources such as wind?
Should electricity demand management play a more important role in the
‘informated’ electricity grids of the future? And is it possible to envisage a
future electricity system in which an extremely high proportion – perhaps 95
per cent – of electricity comes from renewables?
These questions, and many more, were originally addressed by the contributors
to this book at a major conference held at the Open University in 2006.
They have each expanded their conference presentations to produce the
detailed and thoughtful analyses that follow. As might be expected, there are
occasional differences of view, and of emphasis, between authors, and some
areas of controversy remain to be resolved. But there appears to be a broad
consensus that the variability of renewables is a not a substantial problem at
present levels of grid penetration; and that, as the proportion of renewable
generation rises in future, the problems that arise should be amenable to solution,
as electricity grids, generating technologies and load management
techniques evolve into more flexible, more sophisticated and more sustainable
forms.
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