THE FUTURE OF RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY, PT. 2
Volume 2: Renewable Electricity Generation and Storage Technologies
June 2012 (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
“…[T]he Renewable Electricity Futures Study (RE Futures), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, is a collaboration with more than 110 contributors from 35 organizations including national laboratories, industry, universities, and non-governmental organizations…
…[It] is an initial investigation of the extent to which renewable energy supply can meet the electricity demands of the continental United States over the next several decades…[It] explores…very high renewable electricity generation levels—from 30% up to 90%, focusing on 80%...—in 2050…”
[From the report:] “The United States has diverse and abundant renewable resources, including biomass, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, solar, and wind resources. These renewable resources are geographically constrained but widespread—most are distributed across all or most of the contiguous states. Within these broad resource types, a variety of commercially-available renewable electricity generation technologies have been deployed in the United States and other countries, including stand-alone biopower, co-fired biopower (in coal plants), hydrothermal geothermal, hydropower, distributed PV, utility-scale PV, CSP, onshore wind, and fixed-bottom offshore wind. Today, these resources contribute about 10% of total U.S. electricity supply. Renewable generation sources have varying degrees of variability and uncertainty, and the output characteristics of the associated technologies vary substantially. These characteristics must be considered in grid planning and operations to ensure a real-time balance of electricity supply and demand over various timescales as renewable technologies provide greater levels of electricity to the grid.”
[From the report:] “Energy storage is one of several potentially important enabling technologies supporting large-scale deployment of renewable energy, particularly variable renewables such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind. Although energy storage does not produce energy—in fact, it is a net consumer due to efficiency losses—it does potentially allow greater use of variable renewables by shifting energy from periods of low demand to periods of high demand, which reduces curtailment and eases integration challenges. Energy storage can also provide a variety of high value services such as firm capacity and multiple ancillary services…”
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