When the government of India set a goal of deploying 175GW of renewable power by 2022, they understood changes to their power system’s operations were needed to achieve that level of renewable power on the grid.

India decided to work with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop a comprehensive grid integration study identifying operational pathways that would enable India to efficiently meet its renewable energy target.

Now NREL’s grid integration experts are making the processes and best practices from India and other grid integration studies accessible in the form of a new guidebook, produced through the USAID-NREL Partnership’s Greening the Grid platform, that can be used by power system planners and decision makers across the globe. The guidebook, Variable Renewable Energy Grid Integration Studies: A Guidebook for PractitionersPDF, synthesizes the past decade of lessons learned and approaches for conducting high-quality grid integration studies.

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“This guidebook will inform the next generation of grid integration studies,” said Ilya Chernyakhovskiy, NREL researcher and one of the guidebook’s authors.

It will help teams and project leaders to build on NREL’s experience delivering high-quality analysis and insights, and to build consensus among in-country stakeholders around ambitious renewable energy targets.”

Grid integration studies focus on system-level issues that affect delivering variable renewable energy sources to a power grid and identify the least-cost methods to do so. Studies may involve several types of technical analyses, including:

Identifying future generation and transmission portfolios

Simulating power system operations under different scenarios and timescales

Identifying system reliability constraints

Determining the relative costs and benefits of different actions

While any one grid integration study is inherently system-specific, the guidebook demonstrates how all studies involve similar tools, obstacles, and coordination efforts. Additionally, the guidebook devotes special attention to the process of translating a study into actionable results, policies, and operational upgrades.

Chernyakhovskiy further underscored the impact of this guidebook’s release by emphasizing the breadth of experience it draws from. “This publication is a major milestone in the Greening the Grid platform,” he said. “It is the culmination of several years of effort, and the resources provided will be useful to a wide swath of stakeholders internationally.”

The energy transition and renewable energy are hot topics disrupting the utility industry in India and will be a key focus at the POWERGEN INDIA and Indian Utility Week summit which takes place in New Delhi.

For more details visit powergen-india.com or indian-utility-week.com