Sandian Hosts Power Grid Decarbonization Panel Session at IEE PES GM

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Dr. Atri Bera and Dr. Cody Newlun, electrical engineers in the Analytics & Controls area of the Sandia National Laboratories Energy Storage program, chaired and organized a panel at the 2024 IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) General Meeting in Seattle, WA. The panel session, held July 23, 2024, was titled “Role of Energy Storage to Support Reliability, Resilience, and Decarbonization of the Power Grid: Current State, Challenges, and Best Practices.” Dr. Bera was the session chair, while Dr. Newlun gave a presentation titled “Capacity Expansion Planning Modeling Considering Long-term Decarbonization Goals & the Role of Energy Storage.” Other panelists included Mani Vadari of Modern Grid Solutions, Peggy Ip of Electric Power Research Institute, Armando Figueroa Acevedo of Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), and Ahmed Mohamed of Université Grenoble Alpes.

Other areas of panel topic discussions included:

  • Power grid undergoing massive transition to achieve decarbonization
  • Integration of renewable energy resources increasing at a fast pace
  • Variability associated with renewable resources increases uncertainty in planning and operation of grid
  • Energy storage provides a solution since it can shift energy over time
  • Challenges of planning and operation of the grid with energy storage

States and territories across North America are enacting and enforcing an increasing number of policies to fight climate change, mandating utilities to replace fossil-fueled generation with renewable energy resources (RERs) to achieve grid decarbonization. While RERs will help move toward a decarbonized power system, the inclusion of vast quantities of these resources coupled with an expanding threat landscape poses several reliability and resilience challenges to power system planners due to their variability and intermittency.

Energy storage systems (ESS) can alleviate some of these challenges posed by the RERs and threats. However, there still exists significant barriers in modeling, integrating, and deploying ESSs to support reliability, resilience, and grid decarbonization. This panel discussed the best practices, state-of-the-art approaches, and key challenges to the planning and operations of the grid with ESS, including critical topics such as planning for resilience, reliability, recovery, enhanced resource adequacy, and capacity accreditation techniques.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.