Week 1 – Session 8

The challenge of variable power

generation

Sidney LAMBERT-LALITTE

MOOC ENERGY TRANSITION

IFP SCHOOL
Introduction
If you remember what we mentioned in the introduction videos, the perfect energy mix should
be clean, affordable, and reliable. But because no single energy can tick all these boxes
alone, most mixes are a balance between multiple sources of energy.

However, what we saw together clearly is that renewables emit far less carbon dioxide per
unit of electricity produced than fossil fuels.

In this video, I will present one of the main challenges of integrating more renewables in the
power generation mix: the availability of non-dispatchable resources.

The emergence of solar & wind power generation capacities

You have probably heard a lot about the emergence of solar and wind power. Indeed, both
are currently booming. And the International Energy Agency expects them to be the fastest
growing technologies to be installed in the next 20 years. Due to this expansion, one key
challenge we will have to deal with is the availability of resources.

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 The issue of renewables variability
As a matter of fact, depending on climate conditions for each specific site, a wind plant will
generate electricity between 15 and 40% of the time on an annual basis; while for PV, it can
vary from 10 to 25%. You can see on the graph next to me the cyclical nature of solar and
wind resources: in the case of France, solar plants provide more electricity during summer,
while wind generates more electricity during winter. This variability is a major flaw when
compared with load factors of coal, natural gas or nuclear, that can reach up to 90%.

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Another issue comes from the intermittent nature of the wind and solar resources. Obviously,
this is true for a single power installation: when there is no wind, a wind plant will generate no
electricity; but it is also the case at a wider scale. If you look at this graph, showing the solar
and wind production all over Germany during a week in summer, you can see that all the
combined solar and wind plants in production can vary from 1 GW up to more than 40 GW,
and these loads can decrease and increase in only a few hours.

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The issue is that neither the plant owner nor the grid operator decide when to run solar and
wind plants, as these installations are not “dispatchable”. Indeed, solar and wind electricity
come and go with the resource and it is the grid operator’s duty to manage the residual
production of dispatchable plants to match the demand for power.

A need for back-up, flexibility or storage capacities

This implies that we need to maintain costly and polluting back-up technologies, such as
natural gas or coal power plants, to compensate for the missing production when solar and
wind are absent. Another solution would be to store power, but for the time being,
economically viable storage capacities remain limited, although battery cost have greatly
decreased in recent years. My colleague David Texeira, from IFP Energies Nouvelles, will tell
you more about storage in one of the subsequent videos.

But even if production can be forecast accurately, managing the net-load when more and
more variable resources supply a given grid requires technical prowess. The net-load is the
residual part of production that is dispatchable. As solar and wind have zero marginal costs
of production, they will always have priority access to the grid. Other sources of electricity will
then be put in production according to the “merit order”, meaning that the generation units
with the lowest marginal cost will be put in production first, until supply matches demand at
any given time.

If we take the example of California, where new solar PV installations are added every year,
more and more production comes from this resource during the daytime. As a consequence,
the net-load follows a U-shaped curve, from sunrise to sunset.

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The issue is that every year, as the curve gets steeper, there is a need to ramp-up huge
capacities to match demand for power in the evening, when the solar PV supply is gone. This
is a tremendous challenge for the grid operator and power producers, and it will become
more and more pronounced as PV installations increase.

In the end, what we need to continually integrate more solar and wind power production is
flexibility. Flexibility in order to be able to adapt the residual load more efficiently but also
flexibility to shift demand for power at the most adapted time of the day.

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