Characterizing Opportunity Power in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) in Years 2015-2017

Studying the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) day-ahead and real-time markets for the period January 2015 to December 2017, we characterize the growth of curtailment and negative-priced power from renewable generators. Results show that renewable curtailment is growing rapidly, tripling to over 400 GWh from 2015-2018. Negative-priced renewable power is larger and also growing rapidly, reaching 1.5 TWh in 2017 for 40% CAGR.Resource-hours for negative pricing grew nearly 3-fold from 80,006 to 217,728 hours, with the highest single generator reaching 955 hours in 2017 or 33% of the daylight solar hours. Spatially, the quantity of negative-priced power is concentrated at a few dozen renewable generators, reaching peaks of 170GWh at the largest generator. We also consider an averaged-price model (NetPrice) that smooths over fluctuations to estimate the usable quantities of low-priced power. Results for NetPrice show a much larger quantity of low-priced power available than with either negative-pricing or curtailment alone. Overall, these results suggest both that opportunity power is a substantial and growing resource and a number of opportunities to exploit it.

How to treat energy storage as a transmission asset?

ABSTRACT For energy storage to be part of the transmission solution, storage developers need to work with transmission owners and follow the Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) transmission planning protocols. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 841 mostly treats Electric Storage Resource (ESR) as a generation asset. To date, no FERC order lays out a path for treating energy storage as a transmission asset. One of FERC-jurisdictional RTOs – Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) – has sent a “storage as a transmission-only asset” proposal to FERC, which FERC did not reject but did not approve either. This MISO filing begs the question – how to treat energy storage as a transmission project? The industry needs to understand how RTO cost allocation works for new and existing transmission projects. To appreciate cost allocation, stakeholders need to grasp the fundamentals of transmission project categories. Because to put together a business case for storage, modeling is essential. And modeling for reliability and economic projects vary. Getting into the weeds of transmission planning is what it takes to treat storage as a transmission asset.

Congestion Management in Restructured Power Systems with Economic and Technical Considerations

In this paper, restructuring of monopolistic power systems is inevitable in this day and age to cope up with the radical growth of power demand. In developed countries restructuring is already in place while developing countries are getting accustomed to it. Above and beyond the benefits to customers in terms of economy and quality, there are several challenges prevailing particularly in transmission while exercising deregulation. The foremost challenging task of Independent System Operator (ISO) is managing the transmission line congestion in a deregulated power system. In most of the congestion management techniques, only the economic aspects are considered. The minimum voltage derivation for electronic industries and acceptable voltage derivation for high power applications are considered with suitable weighting factors in the objective function.