Features of a fully renewable US electricity system: Optimized mixes of wind and solar PV and transmission grid extensions
By Sarah Becker, Bethany A. Frew, Gorm Bruun Andresen, Timo Zeyer, S. Schramm, Martin Greiner, Mark Z. Jacobson. 2014
211 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A future energy system is likely to rely heavily on wind and solar PV. To quantify general features of such a weather dependent electricity supply in the contiguous US, wind and solar PV generation data are calculated, based on 32 years of weather data with temporal resolution of 1h and spatial resolution of 40×40km2, assuming site-suitability-based and stochastic wind and solar capacity distributions. The regional wind-and-solar mixes matching load and generation closest on seasonal timescales cluster around 80% solar share, owing to the US summer load peak. This mix more than halves long-term storage requirements, compared to wind only. The mixes matching generation and load best on daily timescales lie at about 80% wind share, due to the nightly gap in solar production. Going from solar only to this mix reduces backup energy needs by about 50%. Furthermore, we calculate shifts in FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)-level LCOE (Levelized Costs Of Electricity) for wind and solar PV due to differing weather conditions. Regional LCOE vary by up to 29%, and LCOE-optimal mixes largely follow resource quality. A transmission network enhancement among FERC regions is constructed to transfer high penetrations of solar and wind across FERC boundaries, employing a novel least-cost optimization.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad4efd36c25b01a1c5f04dd1c45aeafb7a47fc22
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Christian Breyer
- Brian Vad Mathiesen
- Henrik Lund
- Mark Z. Jacobson
- Sarah Becker
- Gorm Bruun Andresen
- Neven Duic
- D. Connolly
Citations in the corpus
- Response to ‘Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems’ (2017, background): “There is plenty of room for error if forecasts prove to underestimate demand growth: an investigation into the United States Energy Information 2 This would involve switching from thermal power plants (average efficiency 35% [101]) to wind and solar generators for all electricity, using heat pumps (”
- 100% clean and renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for 53 towns and cities in North America (2018, unknown): “…2014; Mathiesen et al., 2011, 2012,2015; Elliston et al., 2012, 2013, 2014; Rasmussen et al., 2012; Steinke et al., 2013; Budischak et al., 2013; Becker et al., 2014; Child and Breyer, 2016; Bogdanov and Breyer, 2016; Aghahosseini et al., 2016; Blakers et al., 2017; Barbosa et al., 2017; Lu et…”
- Flexibility mechanisms and pathways to a highly renewable US electricity future (2016, methodology): “Other studies have demonstrated the benefits of some flexibility mechanisms individually (e.g., storage in Ireland [12] and aggregation in the western US [13]), shown synergistic or competitive relationships between two different options (e.g., storage and flexible load in ERCOT [14], storage and ov”