The Opportunity

States, cities, companies, and utilities are increasingly committing to transition to 100% clean, carbon-free, energy.

The Challenge

While some clean generation sources (e.g. nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal) can be dispatched, the main sources of low cost clean energy, wind and solar, are variable. Achieving very high percentages of clean generation requires solutions to manage and accommodate the variability. However, over a century of electricity system design, government regulation and market design has been based on the fundamental premise that generation is dispatchable, ramping up and down during the day to follow changes in load.

Solutions

Enabling a high percentage of variable generation requires rethinking this underlying assumption and laying the groundwork to allow “smart” load to automatically follow variable generation and energy storage. Whether encouraging the use of smart thermostats that detect grid conditions and shift load into peak solar hours, or allowing grid-connected battery storage to participate in ISO/RTO markets - regulators need to determine how to remove barriers and develop new pricing signals to reverse the “generation follows load” fundamental premise.

Solutions to generation variability will vary by region, and will depend on the level of renewable penetration. For regions with lower levels of variable generation, solutions can include widening load balancing areas, decreasing market clearing windows, and improving forecasting. At higher levels of renewable penetration, advances in demand flexibility are needed, as well as new ways of using excess renewable generation.