The Value of Inter-Regional Coordination and Transmission in Decarbonizing the US Electricity System

Sector coupling via hydrogen to lower the cost of energy system decarbonization

“…As no new coal plants will likely be built in this region, we consider the options of natural gas combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT), open cycle gas turbine, as well as CCGT with CCS. The VRE resource cost and availability in each zone are represented by supply curves 41 to characterize different possible sites with specific resource profile, maximum potential capacity, and average cost of interconnection. We use three supply curves per zone for onshore wind and one supply curve per zone for PV.…”

Quantifying the challenge of reaching a 100% renewable energy power system for the United States

“…Jacobson et al 20,21 and Frew et al 22 were among the first to publish high-profile analyses of 100% systems for the full United States using high-resolution wind and solar datasets. Aghahosseini et al 6 and Zozmann et al 18 built on this work and extended it to geographic extents larger than just the United States Brown and Botterud 23 added additional temporal detail work by examining transmission in 100% RE scenarios over seven years of historical weather and load data. Other researchers, such as Shaner et al, 14 have modeled 100% RE systems but without considering costs and while focusing on systems that rely exclusively on wind and solar power.…”

Electrification Futures Study: Operational Analysis of U.S. Power Systems with Increased Electrification and Demand-Side Flexibility

“…Without transmission expansion or changes to operating practices, higher penetration of VRE can push transmission lines to their power transfer limits and cause issues such as network congestion and voltage stability (Yao et al 2005). Our results show that high electrification and high VRE penetration leads to higher average utilization of the transfer capability between interfaces (Figure 12), which highlights the importance of inter-regional coordination and transmission in low carbon grids (Brown and Botterud 2020). We also show that interfaces with smaller capacities tend to be more congested or have higher utilization rates (shown as the smaller circles at the top of the utilization rate spectrum in Figure 12).…”