IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021 - 14

J. Charles Smith and Debra Lew
variable renewable energy
the way of the future
T
14
THE RATE OF CHANGE TAKING
place in the energy industry is truly
mind-boggling. There was a time, a few
decades ago, when the electric system
was viewed as a technological backwater,
and universities were dropping
power engineering programs left and
right. The industry's problems had all
been solved, or so the story went. Today,
there is a shortage of trained power system
engineers capable of tackling the
problems of tomorrow, and schools cannot
add new programs fast enough because
they cannot find enough trained
faculty. What happened in the intervening
time?
Thinking on decadal time scales,
about three decades ago, a scrappy
group of entrepreneurs had a vision
of clean renewable energy produced
from wind power. The initial technology
was expensive, the reliability was
low, and there were lots of jokes about
Don Quixote. But support for the vision
grew in Europe and eventually
spread to the United States. Government
research programs sustained the
effort, and industrial players became
involved. Reliability increased, costs
decreased, the technology gained acceptance,
and now wind energy is the
cheapest form of energy in most areas.
About two decades ago, we saw the
same story begin to play out with solar
photovoltaic (PV) energy. Today,
solar PV systems are the fastest-growing
form of energy in the world; their
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2021.3104126
Date of current version: 18 October 2021
ieee power & energy magazine
reliability is high and price is low and
continuing to drop, with predictions
that PVs will soon be cheaper than
wind energy.
Around a decade ago, the same story
started to play out with battery energy
storage. The technology has not reached
the same stage of maturity as solar and
wind, but it is getting there. What will
the next decade bring? Only time will
tell, but we predict that this will be
the decade of hydrogen.
Within the next 10
years, we expect to see
an industrial green hydrogen
infrastructure in
place, with green hydrogen
competing against
natural gas. Societal
demands for decarbonizing
the energy supply
will continue to move
us in that direction.
As individual technologies
continue to make steady ad -
vances, more attention will be given
to making everything work together as
part of a truly integrated system. Progress
in this direction has been dutifully
reported in past issues of this magazine
and will continue to be reported in future
issues. The advent of inverter-based
resources (wind, solar, and batteries)
will continue the trend of displacing
synchronous machines, reducing system
inertia and strength, thereby forcing
us to rethink how to operate the grid
under the new paradigm.
The changing generation mix will
also force a redefinition of resource
The rate of
change taking
place in the
energy industry
is truly mindboggling.
adequacy,
with a completely different
set of characteristics than in the past.
Hybrid resources, such as PV-battery
plants, will provide a link between the
two worlds, and the ubiquitous transmission
system will serve as the glue
that holds everything together. Forecasting
and markets will take on an
ever-increasing role, as the nature of
both the load and generation will be
much more dependent on the weather,
and the closer linkage
between them will open
the possibility for more
common mode failure
events that are not considered
in our current
analysis tools and methods.
Energy systems will
become more interconnected
and interdependent,
and their complexity
will increase, with
hydrogen becoming a
critical bridge between electric and fuel
systems in the process. This interdependence
will extend to industrial processes,
buildings and transportation, water
supplies, and in formation networks.
In this issue, a glimpse of the many
changes underway on the path to the energy
system of the future is provided in
eight articles. We begin with one looking
at the practical aspects of operating
a system with a high share of
inverter-based resources, " A Future
With Inverter-Based Resources, " led by
Julia Matevosyan of the Electric Reliability
Council of Texas. The next, " Quantifying
Risk in an Uncertain Future, " led
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021

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