Challenges along the Journey toward 100% Renewables: A Grid Operation’s Perspective

Power & Energy Society

Speaker: Xinghao Fang, Sales Manager of Operations Technical Studies, ISO New England

Time: Refreshments start at 6pm, talk begins at 6:30pm

The power grid has been evolving rapidly in the last decade and such a trend will likely continue in next ones in our nation, primarily driven by the revolutionary energy source transition from predominant fossil-fueled synchronous generators toward inverted-based renewables (IBRs, including wind, photovoltaic, and battery). In this context, a significant amount of renewable interconnections have been requested in the New England territory: IBRs make up roughly 9,800 megawatts (MW) in today’s system; by the end of this decade, it is expected to have about 11,000 MW of solar power alone.  In addition, other IBR interconnection requests include nearly 16,000 MW of wind, 11,000 MW of battery storage, and 1,200 MW high-voltage direct current (HVDC) from Canadian hydropower. Due to the nature of intermittent resource and unique physical structure and control schemes from conventional synchronous machines, the high penetration of IBRs has been playing a significant role in altering the long-standing behavior of the power system and as such introduced unprecedented grid reliability challenges, including but not limited to, load forecast, power balancing during fast resource ramping, inertia support, voltage control, short-circuit strength, control stability and etc. This talk will walk through context of those pressing challenges and ISO’s on-going efforts (as part of the whole industry’s agenda) on addressing them effectively.

Biography:

Xinghao Fang is currently the Manager of Operations Technical Studies at ISO New England. Since he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with the Ph.D. degree in Electric Power Engineering, he has been working in electric power industry for 16+ years, encompassing the fields of transmission planning and operations. His experience and business interests focus on power system modeling, primary frequency regulation, large-scale power system simulation, power system stability and control with high penetration of inverter-based resources. He also taught Power System Analysis and Micro-grid courses at UConn from 2020 to 2022.

Free and Open to the Public; RSVP is appreciated.  Visit our web page to RSVP and for further details – IEEE PES Boston

For any questions regarding this presentation or any IEEE PES Boston Technical Meetings, please contact: PES Boston Technical Meetings Chair: Chris Sweeny (christopher.sweeny@1898andco.com)

Parking Directions:  Address: 550 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115