Funding Program: SuNLaMP
SunShot Subprogram: Soft Costs
Location: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA
SunShot Award Amount: $960,000
This project increases solar energy penetration into the national power grid by investigating new ways to overcome solar integration barriers. Developing new methods will allow pooling of solar resources over larger geographical areas in bulk electricity markets in order to revise overly restrictive power grid operational processes and practices.
Approach
This project team will work with industry stakeholders to identify barriers to greater solar deployment that work in combination with each other and impact existing standards, markets, and operational practices. This work will lead to an interconnection-wide uncertainty analysis model, which will quantify the major sources of uncertainty of interest in an energy system.
Innovation
This project will allow for the identification of which changes reduce solar uncertainty by 5% or more without significantly impacting reliability scores. This will allow the solar industry stakeholders, like utilities, to better justify costs against potential benefits. By providing a guide that includes how to identify reasonable simplifying assumptions and trade-offs, this project will create a valuable planning tool to help integrate a high level of renewable energy onto the grid.