Research Publications

Decarbonizing the electric power system underpins climate change mitigation. While diverse pathways to decarbonized power exist, all pathways include increasing penetrations of low-carbon renewable energy sources (RES) along with large flexibility requirements to maintain system reliability. Energy storage devices allow this flexibility while also displacing certain firm generation sources like thermal power plants. Thus the system as a whole becomes more dependent on RES, and hence it is important to understand the changing risk profile in this scenario. In this research, we use Monte-Carlo based reliability assessment methods to calculate the risk profile and identify times when the system has a high probability of failure. In doing this for systems with different capacities and types of storage devices, from short-duration batteries to seasonal storage, we assess the impact of different storage configurations on shifts in system reliability. Prior research has shown that the risk profile is greatly influenced by prevailing meteorology, so it is also important to analyse shifts in such meteorological drivers as well. To do this, we use compositing and clustering techniques on the prevailing meteorology during periods of low system reliability to identify large-scale weather patterns driving system stress. Finally, based on the return frequency of these patterns over a 40 year period, we are able to assess the climate risk of integrating these different storage solutions into the power system.