Transmission System Planning for Integration of Renewable Electricity Generation Units

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and solutions for integrating large-scale renewable energy sources like wind and solar into transmission systems, highlighting recent planning studies involving offshore wind farms.

Contribution

It provides an overview of operational challenges and presents recent planning results for integrating a 1,000 MW offshore wind farm into the U.S. transmission grid.

Findings

Operational challenges due to renewable variability

Impact of offshore wind integration on grid planning

Preliminary results from recent planning studies

Abstract

This paper summarizes the operational challenges imposed by integration of renewable electricity generation units in transmission level where the most common renewable generation units are solar and wind farms at the scale of 100s to 1000s MW. Such units, because of their stochastic nature, introduce new complexity and uncertainty to the grid. Throughout this paper, some results from the recent planning study of integration of 1,000 MW offshore wind farm into the U.S. Eastern Interconnection transmission system are shown.