The barriers towards renewables integration and electrification

[EVENT RECAP] A Webinar with Professor George Baker

by Jackson Enright and Sophia Zhou

Professor George Baker, a visiting lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy at the College, spoke on the topic of grid integration of renewable energy and transactive energy management on February 4th. Baker formerly taught at the Business School for 25 years before leaving in 2010 to found his own smart grid company, VCharge. He also has experience serving as the developer of a large wind project in Maine, known as Fox Islands Wind.

Decarbonization of the current energy economy requires a shift to renewable energy, and with it, a widespread electrification of the grid. This shift comes with a massive challenge: the power grid’s capacity to handle the electrification of historically fossil fuel driven energy sources and sectors. 

Baker divides this problem up into a simplification of the grid’s current capacity and the effects of electrification in order to show if the grid could handle this shift. 

The challenge of integrating renewable energy, according to Baker, lies in the power grid’s capacity to handle the electrification of all energy sources. Currently, the grid mostly handles smaller residential and commercial loads. Transitioning to more sustainable energy sources will require the electrification of other energy uses—such as natural gas for heating or oil for transportation.

“Once we take all of those other uses of energy and convert them over to electric, the grid is going to be totally overwhelmed,” said Baker. “The amount of energy that gets moved on the US electric grid, on average, is roughly 360 gigawatt hours per hour (GWh).“ The conversion of other sources would bring the load up to roughly 900 GWh, nearly reaching the grid’s maximum capacity of 1,000 GWh. 

While technically within maximum capacity, such a high load is not manageable for the grid because it requires constant peak performance. “The load would have to be absolutely flattened all the time or we would be blowing through the capacity of the grid,” said Baker. 

Apart from the grid’s load capacity, there lies an additional challenge of variability with solar and wind energy generation. Both are highly time and place specific. Solar works best in areas with long hours of sunshine. Wind works best near coastal areas. Moreover, the peak generations of these energy sources are poorly correlated with load, and short-term variations can be difficult for grid operators to manage.

“The grid is not an interstate highway system,” said Baker. Even when enough power is generated in one location, it can be expensive and difficult to move power across long distances. One way to solve this problem is to invest massive amounts of money into grid infrastructure improvements. 

Right now, energy access is expected to be instantaneous. While other species learn to live with fluctuations in temperature and light through various adaptations, Baker notes that humans are unique in that we haven't needed to live with intermittent energy input, at least in recent history. Thus, someone flipping a light switch expects the lights to immediately turn on. This isn’t so much of an issue when we depend on the ease of storage and transportation associated with fuels like oil and coal, irregularities associated with renewable energy sources pose a significant problem. While massive expansion and investment into the grid and battery storage poses a potential solution, Baker notes that this is not the most cost-effective solution. Rather,  transactive energy management can help turn the problem of load into a solution, by changing how grids fundamentally operate.

Put simply, transactive energy management is a system that coordinates different energy use with grid conditions. Through this system, we could drastically increase the load of the grid by using existing appliances (e.g. hot water heaters, air conditioners, and even electric vehicles) that can be made “flexible” load assets. This means homeowners charging their Tesla batteries during the day when electricity is cheapest because of peaks in solar generation, or heating water several hours ahead of time in touch with troughs in cost. By converting traditional appliances into transactive energy assets, we can make up for a substantial portion of the inflexibility of renewable energy generation. 

With transactive energy management, humans can stay accustomed to instantaneous energy access, all the while converting to a decarbonized, renewable energy system and saving millions of dollars in investment in grid infrastructure improvements. It is by no means a catch-all solution to the intermittency problem, but transactive energy management has the potential to bring the grid towards a more cost-effective and energy efficient solution.