A couple of years ago as I travelled through West Texas, I was
flabbergasted by the vast amount of wind power generation taking place
there in a part of the world long associated with oil production.
The farmers were happy, I was told, because they were making more
money leasing space for wind turbines than they were making from their
traditional oil pump jacks as the oil supply dwindled.
In fact Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state, currently
some 18,531 MW.
To put that into perspective, the state of NSW has around 20,000 MW of
installed electricity generation capacity including coal powered
stations and the many small generators and roof top PV systems.
A March 23 2017 article at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) web site by researchers in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Texas points to a white paper
which is part of a "Full Cost of Electricity" study.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ross Baldick, et. at. University of Texas
Utilities are charged with serving the public interest: They must keep the lights on. That means they need to have something in reserve for times when more electricity is needed than is usual for a given day and time or for those times when equipment is out of service. They need operating reserves, known in electric utility parlance as spinning reserves (obtaining more output from generators already operating) and non-spinning reserves (quickly bringing generators online to meet demand spikes).
Renewable generation poses several challenges to reliable operation of power systems thanks to its inherent variability: Wind speed and direction isn't a constant for example. Operating reserves compensate for variability in both load and generation.
How much does adding renewables to the grid change what operating reserves are needed and how they are dispatched during spikes of demand? That’s what our part in the Full Cost of Electricity (FCe-) project by the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute seeks to understand.
While it seems obvious that reserve capacity must grow as the amount of installed renewable generation increases, we wondered how much it needed to grow and if this intuited response was in fact correct. So we tested our idea by examining historical data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Our conclusion: Although installed wind power has significantly increased over time, reserve requirements have actually decreased.
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What they found in the case of Texas was that going from
a zonal electricity pricing market to a nodal electricity pricing market,
they could actually increase the amount of installed wind power
without needing to increase the amount of non-renewable reserves
and achieve the same reliability.
Article here :-
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/...es-right-wrong
White paper here :-
http://energy.utexas.edu/files/2017/...llary_2017.pdf
