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Distributed Wind and Impacts of FERC Order No. 2222 Implementation

In September of 2020, FERC issued Order No. 2222, directing ISOs to adjust their long-standing tariffs and participation models to enable the operation of distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators in wholesale energy markets. The rule sought to bring wholesale markets under its jurisdiction up to speed with existing expansion of DERs across the United States and to capture the potential benefits that these technologies can provide. This report describes the implementation of FERC Order No. 2222 and the compliance plans that have been submitted so far, attempt to understand the potential impact the rule may have on distributed wind, and provide opportunities for future work to analyze and encourage deployment under these policy conditions. There is an information gap for the type of market interactions distributed wind may have or how it could be best deployed in DER aggregations under future market conditions. There is significant potential for profitable deployment of distributed wind in states that are served by ISOs and covered under Order No. 2222. Distributed wind and other DERs provide local energy that does not need to travel those distances and avoids the losses typically associated with long-distance energy transmission. Deployment of distributed wind can benefit communities that exist away from large load centers by providing local, clean, and affordable energy. Aggregating DERs that include distributed wind could provide these benefits across multiple far-ranging communities if they have access to participate in wholesale markets. A new baseline valuation of distributed wind in areas covered by Order No. 2222 is required to accurately gauge where it is profitable and how it can compete or complement existing or future DER deployment, including as part of an aggregate.

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Distributed Wind Certification Best Practices Guideline: January 16, 2023-January 15, 2026

This Distributed Wind (DW) Certification Best Practices Guideline describes the typical approach for certification of distributed wind turbines above and below 150 kilowatts (kW) in size based on the conformity assessment requirements in the United States. The purpose of the guideline is to clarify and consistently describe the complex path to certification for various systems and components. This is done via clarification of both the required turbine type certification elements, as well as third-party electrical safety listing of turbine system components and subassemblies.

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Distributed Wind Hybrid Energy Systems for Rural Applications

Distributed-wind-based hybrid energy systems can smooth the power output from renewable energy resources. The number of these systems is growing because of their ability to contribute to local energy and resilience needs. Distributed wind hybrid systems offer major benefits for industrial loads, including enhanced energy reliability, cost efficiency, and sustainability. This fact sheet describes those benefits and considerations in detail.

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Cybersecurity Guide for Distributed Wind Presentation

This presentation communicates information about the MIRACL project Resilience Metrics report and Resilience Framework report. It was created for the 2021 MIRACL advisory board meeting. Distributed wind sits at the intersection of grid-connected, off-grid and behind-the-meter cyber-physical electrical energy systems. The unique physical properties and communications requirements for distributed wind systems mean that there are unique cybersecurity considerations, but there is little to no existing guidance on best practices for cybersecurity. This presentation is intended to be a starting point for distributed wind stakeholders including manufacturers, installers and integrators, and operators (facility, aggregator, or utility). A holistic threat perspective is used to describe the adversaries, threats, and potential impacts of cyberattacks, with special emphasis on what sets distributed wind systems apart from other distributed energy resources (DER). We present the recommendations for cybersecurity, both in terms of needs of the system and roles that specific stakeholders should fulfill. Distributed wind systems can come in a variety of architectures and applications, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to cybersecurity. However, this document contains the relevant information for stakeholders to identify the cybersecurity needs of their system, refer to relevant standards, and apply best practices in a manner most consistent with their security and operational goals.

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Cybersecurity for Distributed Wind: What Integrators Need to Know

Few resources exist to address a growing need to secure distributed wind systems. Idaho National Laboratory recently published the Cybersecurity Guide for Distributed Wind, a richly detailed resource outlining a distributed wind system's possible architecture, relevant standards, risk management strategies, and key recommendations for stakeholders. This document highlights key actionable insights from the Guide that integrators can use to execute an effective cybersecurity strategy.

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Cybersecurity for Distributed Wind: What Manufacturers Need to Know

Few resources exist to address a growing need to secure distributed wind systems. Idaho National Laboratory recently published the Cybersecurity Guide for Distributed Wind, a richly detailed resource outlining a distributed wind system's possible architecture, relevant standards, risk management strategies, and key recommendations for stakeholders. This document highlights key actionable insights from the Guide that manufacturers can use to execute an effective cybersecurity strategy.

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Cybersecurity for Distributed Wind: What Operators Need to Know

Few resources exist to address a growing need to secure distributed wind systems. Idaho National Laboratory recently published the Cybersecurity Guide for Distributed Wind, a richly detailed resource outlining a distributed wind system's possible architecture, relevant standards, risk management strategies, and key recommendations for stakeholders. This document highlights key actionable insights from the Guide that operators can use to execute an effective cybersecurity strategy.

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Distributed Wind Monitoring Best Practices

Accessible performance and operational data have been identified as a key enabler for distributed wind energy industry advancement. While utility-scale wind turbines benefit from reliable and continuous supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)-based monitoring platforms, monitoring of the U.S. fleet of distributed wind (DW) turbines has been more inconsistent, unreliable, and sometime difficult to access. Without fleet monitoring data, the industry will never understand and thus work to improve turbine under-performance and reliability issues. For the DW industry to scale up, attract investors, and boost credibility, fleetwide monitoring must be robust and reliable, select data must be made accessible to stakeholders, and the data must be in a format useful to users. To help move the industry toward a more standardized, accessible stream of monitoring data, this distributed wind monitoring best practices report attempts to cover topics including key monitoring channels, hardware, communication strategies, and accessibility. Strategic engagement with DW original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), service providers, lab and university researchers, testing organization, certification bodies, end users and solar photovoltaic (PV) monitoring experts has enabled a better understanding of the current state-of-the-art of monitoring and aided in articulating this set of best practices that will guide OEMs toward harmonized monitoring strategies, aimed at a future goal of achieving accessible performance and operational data for the entire fleet of U.S. distributed wind turbines.

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Case Study: Applying the INL Resilience Framework to Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative Distributed Wind Systems

Traditional metrics and evaluation methods for resiliency are not sufficient to evaluate the effect that distributed wind systems will have, particularly in light of the challenges described above. While the concept of resiliency is not new, its application to the electric grid is neither standardized nor well-defined, and there is little to no guidance on how to evaluate resilience specifically for distributed wind systems. To fill this gap, the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), as part of the multi-laboratory Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad (MIRACL) project, has developed a resilience framework for electric energy delivery systems (EEDS). The framework provides detailed steps for evaluating resiliency in the planning, operational, and future stages, and encompasses five core functions of resilience. It allows users to evaluate the resilience of distributed wind, taking into consideration the resilience of the wind systems themselves, as well as the effect they have on the resiliency of any systems they are connected to. In this study, we evaluate the resilience of the distributed wind systems at Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative to cybersecurity hazards. We show that the wind resource can benefit the overall system resilience during some hazards. We show that the practices in place make the wind subsystems resilient against some cybersecurity hazards but that there are still significant risks associated with other cybersecurity hazards

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Valuation of Distributed Wind in an Isolated System

Remote communities are increasingly adopting renewable energy, such as wind, as they transition away from diesel energy generation. It is important to understand the benefits and costs of wind energy to isolated systems so that decision-makers can optimize their choices in these communities. There are few examples of valuation of wind energy as a distributed resource and numerous differences in valuation approaches, especially in the inclusion of environmental and economic impacts. We apply a distributed wind valuation framework to calculate the benefits and costs of wind in St. Mary’s, Alaska, to the local electric cooperative and to society, finding that the project does not have a favorable benefit-to-cost ratio unless societal benefits are included, in which case the benefit-to-cost ratio is nearly double. Government funding is important to reducing the initial capital expenditures of this wind project and will likely be the case for projects with similar characteristics. Additional fuel savings benefits are potentially possible for this project through technological additions such as energy storage and advanced controls.

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An Evaluation of Advanced Tools for Distributed Wind Turbine Performance Estimation

We evaluate various classes of distributed wind turbine performance tools across two sites in the United States. The class of tools ranges from the simple mass conservation model to the coupled Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes model, all initiated by the WIND Toolkit data set. The resource estimation at the site is evaluated against measured data at the mast location. Taking a sample 100-kW wind turbine and constant losses, we evaluate Openwind, Continuum, and WindNinja tools and document annual energy production (AEP) and time-series statistics associated with the performance estimation of the wind turbine. Using a methodology that is consistent and unbiased across the three options currently available in the industry, we elaborate results at the two sample locations and discuss the probable sources of discrepancy in the AEP estimates. Two main sources of the discrepancy come from the input WIND Toolkit data and the spatial modeling techniques of the tools to capture atmospheric physics. The discussion includes additional values that these tools may bring into the energy assessment process to enhance the owners' confidence over the distributed wind power systems.

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Energy I-Corps 2023: Distributed Wind Energy Toolkit

This presentation covers the purpose and scope of an Energy I-Corps project focused on refining a suite of analytical tools designed to support distributed wind deployment. These tools - the Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen), Distributed Wind Tools Assessing Performance (TAP), and the Hybrid Optimization and Performance Platform (HOPP) - combine to provide users with the ability to simulate consumer purchasing behavior, accurately assess wind resource to better predict turbine performance, and effectively design and optimize hybrid systems that include distributed wind.

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Cybersecurity for Distributed Wind: MIRACL Advisory Board Meeting 2022

This presentation for the MIRACL Industry Advisory Board summarizes the cybersecurity research for distributed wind that was performed during the project. Highlights include an overview of the distributed wind reference architecture, descriptions of the unique needs and challenges for securing distributed wind, the cyber risk management framework that was developed for this project, and key takeaways for various stakeholders.

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Distributed Wind Certification Best Practices Guideline: January 16, 2023 - January 15, 2026

This Distributed Wind (DW) Certification Best Practices Guideline describes the typical approach for certification of distributed wind turbines above and below 150 kilowatts (kW) in size based on the conformity assessment requirements in the United States. The purpose of the guideline is to clarify and consistently describe the path to certification for various systems and components by helping the user navigate the complex path to certification compliance. This is done via clarification of both the required turbine type certification elements, as well as third-party electrical safety listing of turbine system components and subassemblies. In the United States specifically, there is no wind turbine certification scheme that governs or maintains a consistent set of conformity assessment requirements, and this can lead to wide ranging interpretations of the standards and required elements for certifications. This guideline attempts to simplify the path by organizing the information and guiding the user to the applicable set of requirements. Any wind turbine manufacturer or designer of wind turbines used in distributed generation applications in the United States would find value in the conformity assessment guidance in this guideline. Users are expected to be involved in the technical development of the product and supporting documentation, as the details provided are geared towards electrical and mechanical engineering of the system and components.

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Regulatory and Technical Challenges and Barriers to Adoption of Distributed Wind Energy in Agricultural Settings

Distributed wind (DW) energy development can benefit agricultural landowners through the possibility of improved resilience of electrical service from onsite generation and associated economic benefits. DW development currently faces technical and regulatory challenges related to interconnection of projects with distribution or transmission equipment on the main electrical grid. A review was conducted of barriers to adoption for agricultural DW projects and potential roles of various stakeholders in addressing them. One major barrier is that the unique characteristics of wind energy generation such as its variability and intermittency, may require upgrades for the whole power line, which can lead to prohibitive cost burdens on individual interconnection customers. Another barrier is compliance with federal, state, or utility-level regulations that require technology-agnostic, industry-standard equipment that is often not technically realistic for DW projects. DW developers, grid infrastructure owner-operators, regulators, and standards publishers can work together to address these challenges and facilitate DW development.

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A parcel-level evaluation of distributed wind opportunity in the contiguous United States

This study examines the potential for distributed wind (DW) energy across the contiguous United States, leveraging advancements in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's distributed wind model, dWind. The novel modeling approach described here utilizes a high-resolution dataset and analyzes over 150 million parcels, a significant improvement from prior methods that extrapolated results from a smaller random sample. This achievement is enabled through key model performance improvements, such as transitioning to multiprocessing, which reduces runtime by 97 %. This optimized, high-resolution approach allows the inspection of technology deployment potential and impact on a variety of scales tailored to individual properties and regions. The results here align with prior work showing substantial opportunity for energy generation using DW technologies. Key findings reveal a substantial increase from prior results in estimated technical and economic potential for DW. Metrics tuned to highlight economic potential also show increased incentives supporting rural adoption. Results are spatially aggregated for usability and published via the U.S. Department of Energy Wind Data Portal and a custom scenario visualization platform, aiding policymakers, industry, and property owners in assessing DW viability across various scenarios and spatial scales.

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FERC Order No. 2222 and Considerations for Distributed Wind

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 2222 in October 2020. The rule directs Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators (ISOs) to amend their tariffs and participation models to accommodate heterogeneous distributed energy resource (DER) aggregations in the wholesale energy markets that they operate, including capacity, energy, and ancillary service markets. The Commission issued the rule to better capture the benefits provided by DERs deployed in the United States, whose use has been expanding rapidly. The Commission defines DERs as “any resource located on the distribution system, any subsystem thereof or behind a customer meter,” including but not limited to “electric storage resources, distributed generation, demand response, energy efficiency, thermal storage, and electric vehicles and their supply equipment.” The rule aims to increase DER participation in wholesale markets by allowing the creation of DER aggregations, in which multiple DERs that are too small to meet minimum capacity requirements for wholesale markets individually would be able to participate in markets as a single unit. As of June 20, 2023, all ISOs have filed initial compliance plans and a number have begun implementation. Compliance dates range from 2024 to 2029, with Midcontinent ISO having the latest date of compliance proposed for 2029. Southwest Power Pool still has an outstanding date, having no final order yet from FERC, but a target date of the third quarter of calendar year 2025. The rule, which is technology agnostic and requires ISOs to create participation plans that accommodate different DERs, provides an opportunity for distributed wind market expansion. In addition, distributed wind can bring benefits to heterogenous DER aggregations. These benefits include resource diversity (i.e., a complementary generation profile to other types of distributed generation), its small footprint and ability to be co-located with load, and its potential to provide frequency response, voltage support, and black start services, among other ancillary services. This report provides a status update on FERC Order No. 2222, the current state of ISO compliance, and information relevant to the distributed wind industry as DER aggregators and other stakeholders expand their participation to wholesale energy markets.

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Bias Characterization, Vertical Interpolation, and Horizontal Interpolation for Distributed Wind Siting Using Mesoscale Wind Resource Estimates

Much like their counterparts in utility-scale wind energy, developers of industrial, small-scale and distributed wind turbine deployments need to understand and accurately characterize the wind resource to properly assess the power generation and financial ramifications during siting and planning. National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s WIND (Wind Integration National Dataset) Toolkit (WTK) provides a best-in-class wind resource dataset generated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This dataset includes parameters such as the wind speed, wind direction, and temperature at various heights, plus atmospheric stability near the surface. This data is available at 2-km spatial resolution and five-minute temporal resolution across 7 years, from 2007 to 2013 through a publicly accessible API interface. The Tools Assessing Performance (TAP) project seeks to extend this dataset to allow long term resource estimates and leverage it to better equip distributed wind equipment manufacturers, owner-operators, and installation professionals with better tools for practical siting applications. In this report, we present the results from our investigation within the TAP project focused on characterization of bias in WTK-based wind speed estimates and evaluation of vertical and horizontal interpolation techniques. We discuss the tradeoffs between different techniques and their combinations, as well as describe the lower bounds we determine for the studied validation errors. While the specific estimates we present are specific to WTK and the validation dataset we have chosen for this investigation (NREL's Wind Resource Meteorological Database), the overall analysis and the studied techniques are general enough to be applied to a broader set of wind datasets, both simulation-based and observational.

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