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Towards Optimal Coordination Between Regional Groups: HVDC Supplementary Power Control
With Europe dedicated to limiting climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, large shares of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are being integrated in the national grids, phasing out conventional generation. The new challenges arising from the energy transition will require a better coordination between neighboring system operators to maintain system security. To this end, this paper studies the benefit of exchanging primary frequency reserves between asynchronous areas using the Supplementary Power Control (SPC) functionality of High-Voltage Direct-Current (HVDC) lines.
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Harnessing the Full Potential of Clean Energy: The Role of Southern California’s Utility Distributed Energy Resource Pilots
California is committed to achieving carbon neutrality to reduce the threat of climate change by 2045. This will require deep decarbonization across all economic sectors and necessitate rigorous planning to keep energy safe, reliable, and affordable. Southern California Edison (SCE), a utility that delivers electricity to 15 million people across southern, central, and coastal California, undertook an in-depth analysis to identify a feasible and economical path to realizing California’s greenhouse gas reduction goals and achieve carbon neutrality at the lowest reasonable cost by 2045.
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Communication Is Key: How to Discuss Energy and Environmental Issues with Consumers
Scientists are now more certain than ever that humans are responsible for climate change through the combustion of fossil fuels. A recent Global Energy Assessment report, compiled by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, indicates that, globally, domestic energy consumption accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. A fundamental shift in energy consumption is needed, moving away from the use of fossil fuels to meet emission reduction targets.
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Social Challenges of Electricity Transmission: Grid Deployment in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Belgium
The European Union needs to decarbonize its energy generation to reach its goals of climate change mitigation and energy security policies. In 2011, the European Commission published a road map to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) by at least 80% by 2050. The road map foresees five pathways, and, across all of them, renewable energy generation plays a significantly stronger role today. The deployment of renewable energy sources (RES ) to generate electricity is one possible option to decarbonize energy generation.
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Decarbonization of Electricity Systems in Europe: Market Design Challenges
Driven by climate change concerns, Europe has taken significant initiatives toward the decarbonization of its energy system. The European Commission (EC) has set targets for 2030 to achieve at least 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with respect to the 1990 baseline level and cover at least 32% of the total energy consumption in the European Union (EU) through renewable energy sources, predominantly wind and solar generation.
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On the Trade-Off Between Environmental and Economic Objectives in Community Energy Storage Operational Optimization
The need to limit climate change has led to policies that aim for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Often, a trade-off exists between reducing emissions and associated costs. In this article, a multi-objective optimization framework is proposed to determine this trade-off when operating a Community Energy Storage (CES) system in a neighborhood with high shares of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation capacity.
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Integrating Variable Renewables in Europe: Current Status and Recent Extreme Events
In recent months, energy policy in the European Union (EU) has started to focus on the concrete actions required to ensure the realization of a functioning internal energy market in the context of high levels of renewable energy in the post-2020 period. The most important developments include the agreement by the European Council on energy and climate targets for 2030 and the launch of the Energy Union by the European Commission in February 2015. European energy strategy will be strongly based on the development of variable renewables such as wind and PVs.
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Optimal Carbon Taxes for Emissions Targets in the Electricity Sector
The most dangerous effects of anthropogenic climate change can be mitigated by using emissions taxes or other regulatory interventions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper takes a regulatory viewpoint and describes the Weighted Sum Bisection method to determine the lowest emission tax rate that can reduce the anticipated emissions of the power sector below a prescribed, regulatorily-defined target. This bilevel method accounts for a variety of operating conditions via stochastic programming and remains computationally tractable for realistically large planning test systems, even when binary commitment decisions and multiperiod constraints on conventional generators are considered.
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Performance Degradation of Levee-Protected Electric Power Network Due to Flooding in a Changing Climate
This paper presents a methodological framework to evaluate the resilience, with the primary focus on performance degradation, of levee-protected electric power networks to flooding in a changing climate. To this end, a multi-disciplinary framework is established by integrating climate science, hydrology, and electric power network analysis. The framework quantifies the effect of climate change on flood hazard levels in a levee-protected area and the subsequent changes in the resilience of the electric power network.
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On the Path to Decarbonization: Electrification and Renewables in California and the Northeast United States
Climate change threatens our quality of life and the habitability of planet Earth for many species. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, to reduce the risk that global temperature increases more than 2 °C above preindustrial levels, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in developed countries must fall by approximately 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. A number of states and regions in the United States have committed to reducing long-term GHG emissions by this level, including California, New York, and New England.
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