Lighting a Reliable Path to 100% Clean Electricity: Evolving Resource Adequacy Practices for a Decarbonizing Grid
It is the year 2045 in the carbon-neutral southwestern United States. While summer heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity because of climate change, the region’s abundant solar generation produces tremendous amounts of low-cost energy on hot summer days. This energy not only serves daytime loads but it also charges an enormous fleet of batteries that, aided by wind and geothermal power, discharge overnight to effectively eliminate summertime electric reliability concerns.
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Mobile and Portable De-Icing Devices for Enhancing the Distribution System Resilience Against Ice Storms: Preventive Strategies for Damage Control
Climate change has reportedly increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rains, hurricanes, tornados, flood, fire, and ice storms. Ice storms are considered one of the most severe natural disasters that can disrupt people’s daily lives and incur infrastructural damages. Ice storms are the leading cause of large-scale power outages in the United States and elsewhere during the winter season. The damage caused by ice storms can easily result in major power outages, blackouts, and at times shut down entire metropolitan areas.
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Utility-Scale Shared Energy Storage: Business Models for Utility-Scale Shared Energy Storage Systems and Customer Participation
Due to climate change, supply scarcity, and society’s desire to expand access to electricity and improve energy-system resilience, there has been an increasing demand to invest in and use renewable energy sources (RESs) that are environmentally friendly, efficient, sustainable, and affordable. This has diversified and decentralized energy sources and increased their penetration.
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Data-Driven Classifier for Extreme Outage Prediction Based On Bayes Decision Theory
The growing concern over catastrophic weather events, mostly as a direct result of climate changes, has underscored the need for expanding traditional power system contingency analyses to handle the associated risks of extreme power outages. To enable power system operators to make timely decisions when facing extreme events, we explore in this paper the viability of a classifier which uses the machine learning approach based on the Bayes decision theory as a means of predicting power system component outages.
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Islanding Detection of Grid-Forming Inverters: Mechanism, Methods, and Challenges
Over the past decades, because of boosted energy demands and the serious concerns of climate change, inverter-based resources (IBRs) have been widely deployed to integrate renewable energy into power systems for the goal of carbon neutrality. Thanks to the full controllability of power electronic devices, IBRs have the capability to implement reliable and flexible power regulation, which makes them technically feasible for enhancing the resilience and energy efficiency of power systems.
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From Reliability to Resilience: Planning the Grid Against the Extremes
Although extreme events, mainly natural disasters and climate change-driven severe weather, are the result of naturally occurring processes, power system planners, regulators, and policy makers do not usually recognize them within network reliability standards. Instead, planners have historically designed the electric power infrastructure accounting for the so-called credible (or “average”) outages that usually represent single or (some kind of) simultaneous faults (e.g., faults on double circuits).
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Wildfire Resiliency: California Case for Change
The world has seen an increase in catastrophic wildfires that have caused loss of lives, massive economic impacts from the properties and structures destroyed, and negative impacts on our environment and ecosystem. A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey shows the greenhouse gas emissions from the 2018 California wildfires is on par with the entire year of equivalent emissions from all electricity generations combined feeding the needs of California.
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Data-Driven Engineering: The Reliability and Resilience of the North American Bulk Power System [Technology Leaders]
Electricity is an essential need for modern society. Nearly everything we do relies on safe and affordable electric energy. The constant demand for reliable energy delivery exists during a time of rapid changes to and evolutions of the bulk power system (BPS) in North America. Inverter-based resources, such as wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), battery energy storage systems, and hybrid plants, continue to transform the mix of BPS-connected generating resources. Sustainability and climate change initiatives are driving innovations in end-use loads, such as the electrification of the transportation sector.
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Powerlines and Wildfires: Overview, Perspectives, and Climate Change: Could There Be More Electricity Blackouts in the Future?
Overhead powerlines cross extensive areas of forest and grasslands, and these areas are often flammable and can burn. Wildfire is a natural phenomenon important to many ecosystems around the globe, but also capable of considerable damage to people and communities. As a result of human activity in natural spaces, people have altered wildfire regimes over time, and wildfires have become a threat to people, to their property, and infrastructure.
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Advancements in Clean Air Insulation Technologies for Switchgear and Circuit Breakers
Our power systems and grids are rapidly transforming to help realize a CO2 -neutral world. Reducing CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases (GHG) is an important step to address global warming. Power systems must phase out the most potent GHG, sulfur hexafluoride (SF6 ), to achieve this CO2 -neutral society. SF6 has the highest known global warming potential (GWP) of all GHG, estimated to remain in the atmospheric environment for 3,200 years. There is also no SF6 gas waste management system commercially available today. At the same time, utilities must ensure transmission performance and reliability are maintained or increased.
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