Renewable Energy : Challenges and Opportunities

Right from the beginning of commercial and domestic use of electricity, the generation has always been centralized in a massive capacity. We have always depended on the power plants to generate all of the electricity that we used. Our Grid is built to serve the basic purpose of delivering the electricity generated at the doorstep of consumers. But the paradigm of the power system is going to be shifted as we, as individuals, villages, towns, states, countries are becoming more and more conscious about our carbon footprint on the world we live in.

 The Paris Treaty on Climate Change dealing with the green-house gasses emission mitigation, adaptation and financing has been signed by 161 nations within the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) as of October 2016.

 As the developing nations move towards being developed there will be an unprecedented growth in the energy consumption and accordingly the generation must increase.

                      Renewable energy sources seem to be just the right solution for this. But there are many bottlenecks to this solution that might have to be considered before a large scale implementation.

The First and most obvious hurdle is the indeterminacy of such sources, for e.g. Sunlight is present for on an average 7-8 hours throughout the day, same is the case for wind and most of our renewable sources.

Setting up renewable power plants such as solar or wind energy fields require a lot of land area to generate enough energy. Nowadays, private players are coming in to the field of power generation due to liberalization of market. People are starting to set up rooftop solar and wind power plants, thus the consumer is becoming the producer of electricity. Our traditional power grid is not equipped to absorb this technology. The energy and load scheduling for the grid is done before hand to the minutes precision, any changes in the schedule is taken as a contingency and respective changes are made in the functioning as per the situation. But the variability in the predefined schedule is not sudden (reader should note that conditions such as faults, line failure or any other interruptions natural or otherwise are not being considered). This little cozy situation for our power grids changes with the increased penetration of the intermittent renewables in the grid.  In the future, while calculating the power flows in our load flow equations the no of variable factors will increase and will include atmospheric conditions, generators at every other bus in tandem with loads (doesn’t sound very favorable for the electrical engineers who will have to solve it). Clearly we need to come up with newer methods for dynamic scheduling, our conventional generators should be quick to respond in order to maintain the supply demand balance, the storage capacities of the grids needs to be increased, and our ‘radial grid’ must absorb these ‘distributed generators’.

             Technical problems are not the only thing that should be looked at while talking about renewable in the energy market. The pricing system that measures the amount of power consumes and gives the consumer a bill based l on the conventional pricing models will have to be changed. Researchers must develop models that incorporate the energy supplied by the consumer to the grid (also the grid can no longer be radial anymore). Smart meters should be developed. Thus, renewable penetration changes every concept that the mankind has ever known about the Power Grid Working. This age that we all live in today can truly seem to be facing an Energy Revolution.

This upcoming revolution opens up new research areas for scientists and engineers such as photovoltaics, storage technologies, dynamic scheduling, self-healing micro-grids, managing distributed generation, weather predictions etc. It also creates business opportunities due to the privatization of energy market and jobs right from engineers, technicians to menial labor such as cleaning the solar panels, and all these with the promise for a healthier environment, a Win-Win situation for everyone. J

References:

• http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
•  Analysis of the Effect of Distributed Generation on Power Grid Li HaoYang, Ge ShaoYun, Liu Hong Key Laboratory of Smart Grid (Tianjin University), Ministry of Education Tianjin, China