Achieving a 100% Renewable Grid: Operating Electric Power Systems with Extremely High Levels of Variable Renewable Energy

作者：Benjamin Kroposki, Brian Johnson, Yingchen Zhang, Vahan Gevorgian, Paul Denholm, Bri‐Mathias Hodge, Bryan Hannegan · 发表于：IEEE Power and Energy Magazine · 年份：2017 · DOI：10.1109/mpe.2016.2637122 · 被引用次数：1359 · 研究领域：Integrated Energy Systems Optimization、Smart Grid Energy Management、Water-Energy-Food Nexus Studies

What does it mean to achieve a 100% renewable grid? Several countries already meet or come close to achieving this goal. Iceland, for example, supplies 100% of its electricity needs with either geothermal or hydropower. Other countries that have electric grids with high fractions of renewables based on hydropower include Norway (97%), Costa Rica (93%), Brazil (76%), and Canada (62%). Hydropower plants have been used for decades to create a relatively inexpensive, renewable form of energy, but these systems are limited by natural rainfall and geographic topology. Around the world, most good sites for large hydropower resources have already been developed. So how do other areas achieve 100% renewable grids? Variable renewable energy (VRE), such as wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, will be a major contributor, and with the reduction in costs for these technologies during the last five years, large-scale deployments are happening around the world.