High-Level Penetration of Renewable Energy with Grid: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and opportunities of integrating high levels of renewable energy into the power grid, discussing technical issues, solutions, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of technical challenges and solutions for high renewable energy penetration, highlighting future research areas.

Findings

Identifies key challenges such as control complexity and low inertia.

Discusses advanced control and energy storage solutions.

Suggests future research directions for renewable integration.

Abstract

The utilization of renewable energy sources (RESs) has become significant throughout the world especially over the last two decades. Although high-level RESs penetration reduces negative environmental impact compared to conventional fossil fuel based energy generation, control issues become more complex as well as total inertia to the system is significantly decreased due to removal of conventional synchronous generators. Some other technical issues, high uncertainties, low fault ride through capability, high fault current, low generation reserve, and low power quality, arise due to RESs integration. Renewable energy like solar and wind are highly uncertain due to intermittent nature of wind and sunlight. Cutting edge technologies including different control strategies, optimization techniques, energy storage devices, and fault current limiters are employed to handle those issues. This paper summarizes several challenges in the integration process of high-level RESs to the existing grid. The respective solutions to each challenge are also discussed. A comprehensive list of challenges and opportunities, for both wind and solar energy integration cases, are well documented. Also, the future recommendations are provided to solve the several problems of renewable integration which could be key research areas for the industry personnel and researchers.