How Can the UK and US Collaborate to Meet the Challenges of Integrating Renewable Energy into the Grid?

by Graham Ault, Executive Vice President & Drew Smith, Business Development at Smarter Grid Solutions

Tackling the climate emergency isn’t down to one nation or one business or one individual. When our company home city of Glasgow hosts the United Nations’ 26th conference of the parties (COP26) climate change conference in November, we’ll be reminded why countries need to work together to avoid the worst consequences of our planet warming.

Working across both the United States and Europe has given our team at Smarter Grid Solutions (SGS) an insight into why collaboration matters. Being involved in projects on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve seen the similarities and the differences between the US and the UK. Both countries share an awareness of climate change and the need for action, illustrated tragically this year by the wildfires ravaging California and other states, and flooding across western Europe.

Both countries have strong renewable energy policies, which have fueled their investment and development landscapes. In the US, renewable portfolio standards (RPS) continue to be the major driver for the growth of renewables, with eight states already setting standards and several more expected to follow suit, while we see the clean electricity payment policy also stoking further investment.

US investment has boomed, even during the pandemic, with more than 150GW of solar and wind capacity expected to be added by 2024, alongside 21GW of energy storage, with nearly a third of renewables developments paired with batteries. In the UK, renewables now account for 43% of power production, compared with 20% in the US, thanks largely to the way the UK Government has backed offshore wind.

What both countries now need is to take that growing renewable energy capacity and better integrate it into their existing electricity grids. While major projects like offshore wind farms will be connected to the main transmission network, smaller wind and solar farms will be connected to local distribution grids.

These distribution networks need to become flexible smart grids, so that they can handle distributed energy resources (DERs), whether they be generators like wind turbines and solar panels, or storage units, such as batteries. This is where collaboration comes into play, so that the UK and US can share the lessons we’ve been learning in this area.

Taking lessons from the laboratory into the grid

Those lessons include how to use distributed energy resources management systems (DERMS) to help shorten the queue of DERs waiting to connect to the grid. We’ve already shared some of these lessons during a recent US Department of Energy workshop and we regularly share practical knowhow in the UK too.

Adding renewable energy to the electricity grid is essential, not just to decarbonize the current demand for power but also to meet the growing demand that lies ahead, when transport and heat also shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable electricity, adding further pressure when people want to charge their electric vehicles or run their heat pumps.

That growth in renewables presents challenges – and opportunities. The intermittent nature of renewable energy means we need batteries to store power until its required, demand-side response to dial up or down their usage during periods of peak electricity production or peak demand, and alternative fuels such as hydrogen.

All these levers require grid technology to help integrate DERs and then manage the network to balance supply and demand. There are great examples of such technology being developed – including through the US National Labs programs and Ofgem’s innovation competitions in the UK – but now we need to scale-up these experiments so they can be demonstrated then exploited fully at a grid level.

There also need to be reforms of the energy and ancillary markets on both sides of the pond, so that renewables can compete on a level playing field with fossil fuels, small generators can compete with large generators, and aggregated or community-owned generation and flexible demand can contribute alongside traditional single site projects. Making sure that all the power and flexibility from across the spectrum is harnessed properly will be one of the key steps in decarbonizing our grids.

How DERMS can help with grid reliability and resilience

While green and clean power is important, it’s only one side to the energy trilemma that faces the globe. We also need power that’s secure and reliable, as well as affordable and available.

We live in a time where grid resiliency and reliability are moving into the front of the public’s mind. Just in recent weeks, we’ve seen major grid reliability issues in Louisiana, where all the transmission lines into New Orleans were affected by Hurricane Ida.

As more renewables come online and as climate change effects widen, there is a bigger potential for grid islands and microgrids to help support areas with poor reliability in hard-to-reach places in both the UK and US. Getting smaller sections of the grid up and running again after an interruption is often quicker and easier than trying to re-energize the entire network, highlighting the trend we’re seeing towards basing microgrids and resiliency solutions on clean energy assets and new technologies such as storage, rather than older-style utility top-down and fossil-based solutions.

On top of demanding high resiliency and reliability, consumers are becoming more price sensitive when it comes to energy costs. Utilities will need to start investing in ways to keep up current grid reliability and resiliency without making expensive upgrades to their physical infrastructure.

One way to do that is for investment in DERMS that allow integration of cheaper renewables, potentially without the added expensive grid infrastructure upgrades. The recent spikes in wholesale gas prices in Europe and their knock-on effect on electricity costs illustrate the need to keep other parts of consumers’ bills – such as network costs – as low as possible.

Why DERMS need to keep evolving alongside DERs

The purpose of a DERMS is to manage DERs to ensure they comply with grid connection agreements, including flexible operating provisions, in order to keep the network within safe operating and security limits. Yet, as well as balancing supply and demand across the wider network, DERMS can also underpin aggregated DER participation in markets and new customer business models.

For example, a farm with its own solar power installation and batteries can sell excess electricity into the wider grid during periods of peak demand, using the battery storage to maximize the grid and financial value. Or a factory can fire up its equipment when there’s a surplus of renewable electricity in the grid, with lower prices encouraging higher usage at those times.

However, as the DER market evolves, DERMS need to evolve with it. A good example is FERC Order 2222 in the US; independent system operators (ISOs) and system owners will look for batteries to participate in wholesale markets, while distribution system operators (DSOs) will need to enable DER participation while ensuring the integrity of the grid from excessive power flows from aggregated DER.

DERMS will need to find the right balance of controlling the aggregated batteries in line with the new FERC 2222 use cases, yet staying true to their mission of keeping the grid operating safely and securely. In Great Britain, the equivalent of FERC 2222 is currently being implemented with the development of the role of the electricity system operator (ESO) and separate DSO and aggregator roles.

DERs are now starting to participate in a variety of markets; from capacity to make sure there’s enough generation, to balancing to make sure the peaks and troughs of renewables are managed, flexibility to make sure grid capacity is controlled and other grid services functionality, including frequency regulation, voltage control and black start. Yet there is still a long way to go to produce the full coordination across system operation, markets and asset owners required in this new era on both sides of the ocean.

Having experience in both countries is enabling us to learn from the best practice and demanding requirements in each region and bring them together to refine our DERMS. The next step is to increase those collaborations, so we can share the lessons we’ve learned from our customer projects to date and roll them out at grid scale to meet the needs of the emerging clean, flexible and increasingly digital grid.

About the authors:

Graham Ault, Co-founder and Executive Vice-President

Graham Ault is co-founder and executive vice president at Smarter Grid Solutions, an enterprise energy software company headquartered in the United Kingdom, and which operates across North America from bases in New York, Texas and California. He co-founded the company in 2008 as a spin-out from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK.  Graham has over 25 years’ experience in the energy sector, working in grid and market integration of distributed energy and the low carbon transition, with roles ranging from power station design and construction, through to academic research as Professor of Power Systems at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. 

Smarter Grid Solutions (SGS) delivers distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) software to integrate renewable resources to markets and electricity grids, and is contracted to manage 1.2GW of renewable generation, energy storage and flexible loads across the USA, Europe and Asia. In 2021, SGS was acquired by Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and its subsidiary Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc. (MEPPI), in a move that will expand the reach of SGS’ technology to connect more renewables to electricity networks around the globe.

Drew Smith, Business Development

Drew Smith is a sales engineer at Smarter Grid Solutions. Drew has worked in all aspects of the renewable energy industry including finance, product, and business development. He is passionate about helping utilities, developers, and independent power producers add renewable energy to the energy mix. He has a master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in Accounting & Finance from the University of Kentucky.