U.S. DOE commits US$33 million to projects to integrate more renewables on the grid

Share

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) announced US$33 million in funding to 12 projects under a program whose goal is to allow the integration of 50% or more renewable energy on the grid.

The awards through the Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) program are for the development of control systems to coordinate electric load and generation on the grid, to create what DOE describes as an “virtual energy storage system”.

The agency says that these will allow for real-time coordination between distributed solar, large-scale renewable energy and bulk power generation, as well as shaping electricity load.

DOE cites multiple goals for the projects under this program, including reduction of peak demand costs and a reduction in wasted energy as well as the ability to integrate higher levels of wind and solar on the grid.

Individual awards range from $1.3-3.9 million, and the recipients are a mixture of universities, private research bodies, national laboratories and corporations across the United States, as well as the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

The two largest awards at $3.9 million each went to General Electric Global Research and the U.S. DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). General Electric Global Research and partners will develop a distributed flexibility resource technology to aggregate responsive flexible loads and distributed resources, to provide what it describes as “synthetic” reserve services to the grid.

And important aspect of this project will be the development of a forecast tool to use short-term and real-time weather forecasts along with other data to estimate the reserve potential of aggregate loads and distributed generation on a day-ahead basis.

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.

Popular content

Share

Related content

Elsewhere on pv magazine...

Leave a Reply

Please be mindful of our community standards.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.

Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.

You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.

Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.