NERC Annual Report Highlights Renewables
Trend
Oct 19, 2007 - Wind Energy Weekly
The nation's transmission operators and utilities
will increasingly need to accommodate a much larger
portion of generation from growing amounts of renewable
energy resources such as wind power coming online,
the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC)
said in its latest annual “Long Term Reliability
Assessment.”
Largely as a result of growing concerns over global
climate change, the increasing use of clean, inexhaustible
renewable energy as a mainstream source of electricity
generation is highlighted in the report as a trend
that is projected to continue.
The annual report focuses on the reliability of
the nation’s electricity grid and monitors load
growth as well as projected development of new generation
and transmission infrastructure to meet that growth.
Projected increases in demand and lagging development
in new transmission—an issue for both wind and the
electric industry as a whole—are identified as concerns
in the report.
Two specific and notable actions related to wind
power are identified by NERC: a need to develop
a consistent approach to calculate wind power capacity
credit for purposes of determining reliability requirements,
and the need to do further research on wind and
solar power integration to determine how such resources
can best be integrated into the nation’s power grid.
AWEA will be working with NERC to support these
two efforts within the NERC initiatives.
The report notes the growth of renewable energy
standards, now in place in 25 states and the District
of Columbia, and how those policies will drive growth
of renewable energy in general and wind power in
particular over the next few years.
New to the annual report this year is the inclusion
of “scenarios” identifying significant changes that
could likely occur in the electric industry and
their resulting impact on transmission and generation
planning. One such scenario identified a significant
shift in the industry if climate-change legislation
is passed in the near future. Such legislation would
seek to sharply cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions
from fossil-fuel burning power plants, which in
turn would require a significant change in the U.S.
electric generation portfolio supply mix. The report
identified that a large increase in renewable energy
resources will also accelerate the need for more
transmission infrastructure. Despite a 30% projected
increase in transmission lines over what NERC reported
last year, much more transmission will need to be
built in order to access new wind power resources,
the report stated.
The full report is available at: ftp://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/pubs/LTRA2007.pdf
.
