2018 Standard Scenarios Report: A U.S. Electricity Sector Outlook
This presentation is the slide deck used for the 2018 Standard Scenarios Webinar.
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Engineering topics
Mai, Trieu T
Publications and source records attributed to Mai, Trieu T.
The Electrification Futures Study: Demand-Side Scenarios
Webinar presented July 26, 2018, on the second report in NREL's Electrification Futures Study series, which focuses on scenarios reflecting a wide range of possible electricity demand growth through 2050 driven by the adoption of end-use electric technologies.
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Prospective Costs, Benefits, and Impacts of U.S. Renewable Portfolio Standards
These slides were presented at a webinar on January 9, 2017. The slides overview a report that evaluates the future costs, benefits, and other impacts of renewable energy used to meet current state renewable portfolio standards (RPSs). It also examines a future scenario where RPSs are expanded. The analysis examines changes in electric system costs and retail electricity prices, which include all fixed and operating costs, including capital costs for all renewable, non-renewable, and supporting (e.g., transmission and storage) electric sector infrastructure; fossil fuel, uranium, and biomass fuel costs; and plant operations and maintenance expenditures. The analysis evaluates three specific benefits: air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. It also analyzes two other impacts, renewable energy workforce and economic development, and natural gas price suppression. The analysis finds that the benefits or renewable energy used to meet RPS polices exceed the costs, even when considering the highest cost and lowest benefit outcomes.
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Timescales of Energy Storage Needed to Reduce Renewable Energy Curtailment: Report Summary
This report analyzes the storage duration required to reduce variable generation (VG) curtailment under high-VG scenarios. It also examines the value of storage with varying durations.
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2017 Standard Scenarios Report: A U.S. Electricity Sector Outlook
Webinar slide deck for the 2017 Standard Scenarios Report (https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy18osti/68548.pdf).
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The Value of Wind Technology Innovation: Implications for the U.S. Power System, Wind Industry, Electricity Consumers, and Environment
Improvements to wind technologies have, in part, led to substantial deployment of U.S. wind power in recent years. The degree to which technology innovation will continue is highly uncertain adding to uncertainties in future wind deployment. We apply electric sector modeling to estimate the potential wind deployment opportunities across a range of technology advancement projections. The suite of projections considered span a wide range of possible cost and technology innovation trajectories, including those from a recent expert elicitation of wind energy experts, a projection based on the broader literature, and one reflecting estimates based on a U.S. DOE research initiative. In addition, we explore how these deployment pathways may impact the electricity system, electricity consumers, the environment, and the wind-related workforce. Overall, our analysis finds that wind technology innovation can have consequential implications for future wind power development throughout the United States, impact the broader electricity system, lower electric system and consumer costs, provide potential environmental benefits, and grow the U.S. wind workforce.
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8760-Based Method for Representing Variable Generation Capacity Value in Capacity Expansion Models: Preprint
Capacity expansion models (CEMs) are widely used to evaluate the least-cost portfolio of electricity generators, transmission, and storage needed to reliably serve demand over the evolution of many years or decades. Various CEM formulations are used to evaluate systems ranging in scale from states or utility service territories to national or multi-national systems. CEMs can be computationally complex, and to achieve acceptable solve times, key parameters are often estimated using simplified methods. In this paper, we focus on two of these key parameters associated with the integration of variable generation (VG) resources: capacity value and curtailment. We first discuss common modeling simplifications used in CEMs to estimate capacity value and curtailment, many of which are based on a representative subset of hours that can miss important tail events or which require assumptions about the load and resource distributions that may not match actual distributions. We then present an alternate approach that captures key elements of chronological operation over all hours of the year without the computationally intensive economic dispatch optimization typically employed within more detailed operational models. The updated methodology characterizes the (1) contribution of VG to system capacity during high load and net load hours, (2) the curtailment level of VG, and (3) the potential reductions in curtailments enabled through deployment of storage and more flexible operation of select thermal generators. We apply this alternate methodology to an existing CEM, the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS). Results demonstrate that this alternate approach provides more accurate estimates of capacity value and curtailments by explicitly capturing system interactions across all hours of the year. This approach could be applied more broadly to CEMs at many different scales where hourly resource and load data is available, greatly improving the representation of challenges associate with integration of variable generation resources.
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