The Integration of Renewables on the Grid

A Webinar with Professor George Baker of the Harvard University Center for the Environment

Andrew De Souza

Have you ever been confused by the term “the grid” but been too scared to ask because it seems to be something that everybody just accepts? Well fear no longer, as Professor George Baker has finally provided some much needed clarity to the matter. After a stint with the Business School, Professor Baker briefly left to work on his company VCharge before returning to Harvard as a visiting professor. Today’s webinar topic was how to integrate renewables onto the electric grid, and started off with a basic introduction to how the grid functions. It became clear that electrifying our energy system would require an increase in total capacity which is currently around 1 TW. In order to have an energy system that functions, Baker says there are 3 steps we must follow: Step 1: Generation must equal load at all times and on all time scales. Step 2: Consumers (residential, commercial, industrial) pay no attention to when they turn things on. Step 3: Managing the grid means adjusting generation to meet fluctuating load.

This poses significant issues with regards to the opportunities to implement renewables to the grid — the main two issues being storage and transportation. These two issues go hand in hand: if you could transport surplus energy produced by solar panels on the west coast to an energy-deficient area on the east coast then storage wouldn’t be needed. The reality is that storage for electricity costs about 350 times more than gasoline, thereby rendering batteries inefficient. Instead, systems are designed to produce more energy than is needed at certain times to account for peak energy demands, thereby leading to what is called curtailment — energy production has to be limited as it cannot be stored. Professor Baker explained that this creates an opportunity as curtailment drives real time price variability. When the wind is strong and the sun is shining (given demand is low) the price of electricity plummets and actually reaches a point where you can get paid to use energy! The low-bearing fruit here are devices with embedded storage such as hot water and EVs — “when you charge your car at night, you don’t care when exactly it charges, simply that it is fully charged when you wake up in the morning” says Baker. In order to integrate renewables these issues of storage and transportation must be solved while real time price variability provides a myriad of entrepreneurial opportunities.