Improving performance of power systems with large-scale variable generation additions

A power system with large-scale renewable resources, like wind and solar generation, creates significant challenges to system control performance and reliability characteristics because of intermittency and uncertainties associated with variable generation. It is important to quantify these uncertainties, and then incorporate this information into decision-making processes and power system operations. This paper presents three approaches to evaluate the flexibility needed from conventional generators and other resources in the presence of variable generation as well as provide this flexibility from a non-traditional resource - wide area energy storage system. These approaches provide operators with much-needed information on the likelihood and magnitude of ramping and capacity problems, and the ability to dispatch available resources in response to such problems.