Citing “emerging resource adequacy risks” making it ever more urgent for electric utilities to accurately assess resource adequacy, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) announced an initiative on Tuesday aimed at building better RA research, assessment and modeling tools for all industry stakeholders.

EPRI’s effort is being undertaken in partnership with “grid operators, utilities, researchers and other key stakeholders” from the electric industry. The project has 12 initial participants including NERC; additional contributors are expected to join during the life of the project, which began in the first quarter of 2021 and will conclude in 2023.

EPRI sees the need for new RA tools as increasingly urgent in light of ongoing efforts to lower carbon emissions across the North American economy, causing energy use to shift from fossil fuels to electricity in fields like transportation, cooking and heating. At the same time, electric utilities themselves are trying to cut down on their carbon emissions by tapping renewable resources such as wind and solar.

However, these resources and their behavior are not always fully captured by existing adequacy metrics and models, as NERC and WECC warned in a joint report last year. (See NERC, WECC Warn of Inverter Modeling Gaps.) At the same time, EPRI warns, current methods may also not be adequate to account for “more frequent and severe storms and other weather impacts” resulting from climate change.

“Reliably meeting electricity needs 24/7 is increasingly important as electrification expands, becoming even more vital to the nearly 400 million people we serve in North America,” NERC Senior Vice President and Chief Engineer Mark Lauby said in a press release. “Through our collaboration with EPRI and other industry leaders, we are preparing for the transformation of the grid to ensure that resilience is sustained and improved, as the grid becomes more decarbonized, decentralized and digitized.”

Initiative Covers Metrics, Models, Tools

The initiative comprises four main tasks: developing RA assessment metrics, updating models and data, improving current commercially available RA assessment tools, and producing case studies using the new methods.

For the first task, EPRI and its partners will create guidelines for metrics that better reflect the nature of outages and the consequences of deficient supply, along with guidelines for setting adequacy criteria that take into account the specific needs of a system, the regulatory and market context, and available mitigating options. Participants will also deliver a “framework … for developing planning scenarios that account for evolving technology, policy and climate dimensions.”

In the models and data task, the group will target vendor-neutral reference models and algorithms that reflect the wider spectrum of technologies and the demand and system characteristics of the changing grid. Team members will also develop guidelines for streamlining the process of data collation in RA studies for new and existing models.

Under the third task, participants will document the capabilities of existing assessment tools — and those currently under development — regarding different resource mixes and regulatory/market constructs, while specifying new metric, model and algorithm improvements that could accelerate tool performance.

The final task involves performing case studies that will “demonstrate the analytic capabilities required for RA … illuminate the deficiencies of existing commercial … [research and development] processes and tools, and demonstrate and evaluate the methods being developed through this project.” Four to six case studies, covering differing regions, issues and tools, are expected to be produced through the initiative.

Participation is open to utilities and RTOs, research groups, tool vendors, regulatory groups and other stakeholders; nonproprietary products of the initiative will be made available to the public, either for purchase or otherwise.

“Utilities are transforming with their foot on the accelerator,” EPRI President and CEO Arshad Mansoor said. “Serving tomorrow’s energy customer means anticipating and preparing for high-impact events when, where and how they may occur. Through this initiative, EPRI is leading industry-level collaboration to understand and overcome power supply challenges before they happen.”