31,345 research outputs found
Solar+Storage for Low-and Moderate-Income Communities: A Guide for States and Municipalities
The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) has produced a new report for states and municipalities on solar+storage for low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. The report explains how solar+storage can benefit LMI residents and describes a variety of policy tools for doing so, including grants, rebates, utility procurement standards, financing support, opening markets, and soft cost reduction
Radiative Forcing: Climate Policy to Break the Logjam in Environmental Law
This article recommends the key design elements of US climate law. Much past environmental law has suffered from four design problems: fragmentation, insensitivity to tradeoffs, rigid prescriptive commands, and mismatched scale. These are problems with the design of regulatory systems, not a rejection of the overall objective of environmental law to protect ecosystems and human health. These four design defects raised the costs, reduced the benefits, and increased the countervailing risks of many past environmental laws. The principal environmental laws successfully enacted since the 1990s, such as the acid rain trading program in the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments and the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, were consciously designed to overcome the prior design defects. New law for climate change should improve on the design of past environmental law, fostering four counterpart solutions to the prior design defects: cross-cutting integration instead of fragmentation, attention to tradeoffs instead of their neglect, flexible incentive-based policy instruments such as emissions trading in place of rigid prescriptive commands, and optimal instead of mismatched scale. This article advocates a design for U.S. climate policy that embodies these four design solutions. It proposes a policy that is comprehensive in its coverage of multiple pollutants (all GHGs), their sources and sinks; multiple sectors (indeed economy-wide); and multiple issues currently divided among separate agencies. It advocates explicit attention to tradeoffs, both benefit-cost and risk-risk (including both ancillary harms and ancillary benefits), in setting the goals and boundaries of climate policy. It advocates the use of flexible market-based incentives through an efficient cap-and-trade system, with most allowances auctioned along multi-year emissions reduction schedules that are reviewed periodically in light of new information. And it advocates matching the legal regime to the environmental and economic scale of the climate problem, starting at the global level, engaging all the major emitting countries (including the U.S. and China), and then implementing at the national and sub-national levels rather than a patchwork bottom-up approach. In so doing it addresses the roles of EPA regulation under the current CAA and of new legislation. It argues that among environmental issues, climate change is ideally suited to adopt these improved policy design features
Adaptive Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources in Lossy Power Distribution Systems
This paper is concerned with the problem of coordinating a set of distributed
energy resources (DERs) in a lossy power distribution system to provide
frequency regulation services to a bulk power grid with the explicit
consideration of system losses. To this end, we formulate the problem as an
optimization problem, the objective of which is to minimize some cost function
subject to a set of constraints. The formulation requires knowledge of
incremental total system losses, which we approximate using the so-called loss
factors (LFs) that explicitly capture the impacts of both active and reactive
power injections on system losses. The LFs are estimated recursively using
power injection measurements; thus, they are adaptive to various phenomena that
impact the power system operation. Numerical simulation on a 33-bus
distribution test feeder validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework
Optimal Regulation Response of Batteries Under Cycle Aging Mechanisms
When providing frequency regulation in a pay-for-performance market,
batteries need to carefully balance the trade-off between following regulation
signals and their degradation costs in real-time. Existing battery control
strategies either do not consider mismatch penalties in pay-for-performance
markets, or cannot accurately account for battery cycle aging mechanism during
operation. This paper derives an online control policy that minimizes a battery
owner's operating cost for providing frequency regulation in a
pay-for-performance market. The proposed policy considers an accurate
electrochemical battery cycle aging model, and is applicable to most types of
battery cells. It has a threshold structure, and achieves near-optimal
performance with respect to an offline controller that has complete future
information. We explicitly characterize this gap and show it is independent of
the duration of operation. Simulation results with both synthetic and real
regulation traces are conducted to illustrate the theoretical results
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