How solar power is integrated into the grid
My name is Kathleen O’Brien – I am an engineer here at GE Global Research and I study photovoltaic (PV) power systems and the integration of these systems into the power grid. We recently announced an exciting new project funded by the US Department of Energy that will help us to better understand the issues arising from the application of a large amount of solar electricity generation to the US power grid.
Along with Arizona Public Service (APS), Arizona State University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a team from GE Global Research and GE Energy will take part in a 3.5 year, $3.3 million dollar program to study the impact of high solar energy penetration levels on the US power grid. This project is called “High Penetration of Photovoltaic Generation Study – Flagstaff Community Power” and is a part of the Department of Energy’s High Penetration Solar Deployment Program which was announced last year.
The project is built upon a larger pilot project launched by Arizona Public Service in Flagstaff called the APS Community Power Project. The Community Power Project will provide an opportunity for customers connecting to the utility through a designated feeder to experience the benefits of solar power without the upfront costs associated with the purchase of solar panels, equipment, and installation labor. The utility will provide rooftop solar electric systems at no cost to the community and will then charge customers for the power produced by these systems at a lower Community Power rate which is fixed for 20 years. Approximately 1.5MW of solar generation is expected to be installed along the Sandvig 4 feeder in Flagstaff. Participating customers will host a total of 1000kW of distributed PV: 600kW will be installed as residential rooftop systems sized 2-4kW, and 400kW as larger commercial/industrial systems sized 50-150kW. The remaining 500kW will be hosted by APS and installed as a small solar farm located on the feeder. This project is a step toward helping APS to achieve its Renewable Energy Standard of 15% of electricity generated by renewables by 2025, while also helping customers to gain control over energy costs. The pilot project will also be a part of APS’s smart grid initiatives for operation and data collection, and comprehensive monitoring and data collection will be installed throughout the feeder and on many of the distributed PV sources. The data collected on this project will enable APS to evaluate how distributed energy impacts its system, and to define guidelines for the design of similar systems in the future.
GE’s collaboration with APS on the High Penetration of Photovoltaic Generation Study will provide us with a unique opportunity to study the effects of increasing levels of PV penetration on a typical distribution feeder. Our partners at GE Energy EA&SE will provide system impact and performance evaluation studies leading to an evaluation of the impact of distributed PV generation on the feeder voltage. This evaluation is more complex than it sounds because both the load (the amount of power being drawn from the feeder) and the source (the amount of power being created by the sunlight) are constantly changing. We will also have the opportunity to study the effect of several of the advanced features of the recently introduced GE utility-scale solar inverter. We will deploy the GE inverter in the 500kW solar farm. Data collection and analysis coupled with modeling and simulation will allow us to better understand the behavior of the inverter under real-world conditions. These results can then be extrapolated to help us to understand other systems, even those that may be significantly larger in scale.
We are very excited to start this project and to further our understanding of how GE can best contribute to technology development in grid-integration of photovoltaics.
[...] are the some questions that researchers at General Electric (GE) and Arizona Public Service (APS), along with three other partners, are seeking to address through a [...]