Planning for Grid Integration folder
Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) Transmission Planning Process: A Guidebook for Practitioners
Achieving clean energy goals may require new investments in transmission, especially if planners anticipate economic growth and increased demand for electricity. The renewable energy zone (REZ) transmission planning process can help policymakers ensure their infrastructure investments achieve national goals in the most economical manner. Policymakers, planners, and system operators around the world have used variations of the REZ process to chart the expansion of their transmission networks and overcome the barriers of traditional transmission planning. This guidebook seeks to help power system planners, key decision makers, and stakeholders understand and use the REZ process to integrate transmission expansion planning and renewable energy generation planning. The guidebook presents a general organizational structure and details each step of the REZ process.
The Future of Electricity Resource Planning
This report examines the future of electricity resource planning in the context of a changing electricity industry. The report examines emerging issues and evolving practices in five key areas that will shape the future of resource planning: (1) central-scale generation, (2) distributed generation, (3) demand-side resources, (4) transmission, and (5) uncertainty and risk management. The analysis draws on a review of recent resource plans for 10 utilities that reflect some of the U.S. electricity industry’s extensive diversity.
Planning for the Renewable Future: Long-Term Modelling and Tools to Expand Variable Renewable Power in Emerging Economies
This step-by-step guide provides a comprehensive overview of power system planning and describes the key planning implications related to variable RE deployment and integration, with a particular focus on implications for emerging economics. The second part of the report describes the considerations needed to accurately represent variable RE in energy models and suggests several cross-cutting solutions to improve capacity expansion modeling.
Electricity Capacity Expansion Modeling, Analysis, and Visualization: A Summary of Selected High-Renewable Modeling Experiences
Capacity expansion modeling is a fundamental tool for planning the future power system. Capacity expansion models can provide insights on possible pathways for the power system under different assumptions about technology innovation, transmission expansion, demand changes, and policies. This report summarizes the experience of capacity expansion modeling at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The authors address in detail NREL’s approach to key questions that arise when modeling future capacity expansion, with a particular emphasis on modeling significant levels of variable RE deployment.
Best Practices in Electric Utility Integrated Resource Planning
This report presents a brief introduction to the IRP process as it has been implemented in the United States and describes the purpose and use of the IRP process. The report presents several case studies of IRPs and summarizes how they differ in terms of planning horizon, frequency of updates, representation of existing resources and planned retirements, and relationship with long-term procurement processes. The case studies include examples of best-practices for including renewable energy and energy efficiency considerations in the IRP process.
Mexico’s Regulatory Engagement in Bulk Electric Power System Planning: An Overview of U.S. Practices and Tools
This report, written as a summary for power system regulators and operators of Mexico, examines key practices of different U.S. jurisdictions for evaluating and approving generation and transmission expansion projects. The report includes a discussion about cost-benefit analysis to inform decision–making and a discussion about reliability standards and how to model reliability in the bulk electric power system in the context of increased adoption of variable renewable resources. Section 3.3 reviews approaches to modeling dispatch, capacity expansion, and power flow, with an emphasis on accurate representation of variable renewable resources, and Table 3 provides samples of power system models in use in North America.
Multistate Decision Making for Renewable Energy and Transmission: An Overview
This article provides an overview of the traditional power system planning process in the United States, summarizes how legal authority for transmission planning is allocated between states and the U.S. government, and evaluates the challenges and solutions that state regulators have encountered with planning new transmission for renewable energy development. In addition to a discussion about the important merits of increased balancing area cooperation for system operations and transmission planning, the article includes a detailed review of the Renewable Energy Zones transmission planning process as implemented in Texas’ Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) approach.