How Virginia Can Meet Its Clean Power Plan Targets

In August 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the first-ever carbon pollution standards for existing power plants. The CPP builds on progress already under way to move the country toward a cleaner electricity system, including rapidly falling prices of renewables and increased deployment of moneysaving energy efficiency measures. The plan enables states to use a wide range of options to meet their standards, such as existing clean energy policies and power plants (the focus of this analysis), other tools to cut electricity use and increase the use of renewables, and broader initiatives such as participation in a capand- trade program or use of a carbon tax.This fact sheet examines how Virginia can use its existing policies and infrastructure to meet its emission standards under the Clean Power Plan while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities

How Pennsylvania Can Meet Its Clean Power Plan Targets

This fact sheet examines how Pennsylvania can meet -- and even exceed -- its CPP standards through expanding its clean energy policies and making better use of existing power plants while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities in clean energy. Pennsylvania's existing clean energy policies put the state's power plants in good position to make carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions that will help the state meet its CPP targets. Existing policies that promote renewable development and improve energy efficiency through 2020 -- 21 will help Pennsylvania meet its initial targets. If extended and expanded, these policies could provide a basis to meet the targets through 2030

Three Essays on “Energy , Environment, and Developmental Economics”

This dissertation examines topics related to renewable energy development and investment planning, energy markets, environment degradation and economic development. The substantial ecological costs of deforestation are well known and considered globally important due to biodiversity loss, land degradation, soil erosion, and contributions to climate change. The first essay focuses upon understanding the tradeoff between development and deforestation in Africa. In the second essay, spatial analysis and Geographic Information System (GIS) are applied to determine potential locations for wind farms development in the state of West Virginia. Lastly, the third essay examines the role of wind power penetration on wholesale electricity market. The first essay explores the relationship between economic growth and deforestation in African countries. During the past half-century, the continent of Africa has suffered massive losses of forested areas due to the changing structure of economies, increasing population, and expanding globalization. This research examines statistical evidence for the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis as applied to deforestation occurring within Africa from 1990 to 2016. Changes in forest cover data are explained with Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators to overcome the endogeneity problems arising from reverse causality between deforestation and explanatory variables. The empirical results of a panel GMM confirm the EKC hypothesis is valid for deforestation in Africa with a turning point estimated to be US $3,000. Heterogenous panel non-causality findings suggest that Africa could deter and reverse deforestation through appropriate land-use and forest products trade policies, and the consequences of these policies would not impact their economic growth. In the second essay, a multi-criteria decision analysis employing Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and GIS are used for assessment of potential sites for future utility-scale wind farms in West Virginia. Worldwide, demand is increasing for renewable energy. While wind power is a proven, sustainable energy source, siting can be challenging. Identifying potential sites for wind turbines is a significant step in renewable energy resource planning. Wind turbine site suitability is primarily dependent upon wind speed at a location along with other environmental, social, and economic factors. It is critical to arrive at a robust wind farm decision to improve public acceptance, preserve the environment, and maintain pristine habitats. This research builds upon previous studies and contributes to the literature by incorporating two important components into siting: (1) inclusion of critical wildlife habitat for birds and bats as an elimination criterion within the AHP, and (2) the participation by wind power experts in the AHP decision-making process. By incorporating expert opinions with the weighing of ten siting factors, about 70,000 hectares of land are identified as \u27highly suitable\u27 for wind power development throughout the state of West Virginia. This area represents the potential to yield an estimated 29,000 MW of future utility-scale wind power capacity, which is larger than the current coal dominated electricity generation capacity in West Virginia. The third essay examines the wind power penetration impacts on wholesale electricity markets. Using data from two wholesale electricity markets (Pennsylvania – New Jersey – Maryland (PJM) and Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)), four energy policy questions are addressed: (1) How much does wind power integration impact wholesale electricity prices under different markets? (2) Does the merit-order effect (MOE) exist at different quantiles of wholesale electricity prices? (3) What drives the day-ahead market (DAM) and real-time market (RTM) prices at different market conditions in both markets? (4) Does the increasing penetration of wind power undermine its market value along with the market values of other generating technologies? To answer these questions, quantile regression is used to obtain coefficient estimates that indicate wind penetration has unequal impacts on wholesale electricity prices and market values across quantiles, reinforcing the need for this type of analysis. The empirical analyses confirmed the existence of the merit-order effect across different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wholesale prices for both DAM and RTM, implying that the increasing deployment of wind power for electricity generation significantly suppresses the wholesale electricity prices in the PJM market. Contrary to the PJM estimations, merit-order effects are confirmed across quantiles of wholesale prices for only the DAM in the ERCOT market. Furthermore, the findings show that as wind generation expands within the market, the revenue earned by wind power producers reduces across all quantiles of the conditional distribution of its unit revenue. Specifically, each additional GWh increase in electricity from wind is associated with a fall in its unit revenues across quantiles by an amount that ranges from approximately$0.01/MWh to $0.06/MWh. Results also confirm cross-cannibalization impacts such that each additional GWh increase from wind is associated with decreased gas and baseload unit revenues across all quantiles ranging from$0.02/MWh to $0.06/MWh. Contrary to unit revenue results, there is weak evidence of increasing wind supply\u27s cannibalization effect for value factor as positive impacts occur below the 90% quantile and negative impacts occur at quantiles 90% and greater. The negative impacts of wind power on gas and baseload generators demonstrate the need for corrective policies

Impact of Wind, Solar, and Other Factors on Wholesale Power Prices: An Historical Analysis—2008 through 2017

Wholesale power markets have evolved. Some of the most prominent changes over the last decade in the United States include growth in wind and solar, a reduction in the price of natural gas, weakened load growth, and an increase in the retirement of thermal power plants. Here we empirically assess the degree to which wind and solar—among other factors—have influenced wholesale electricity prices. We show that wind and solar have contributed to reductions in overall average annual wholesale electricity prices since 2008, but that natural gas prices have had the largest impact. More notable is that expansion of variable renewable energy has led to significant changes in locational, time of day, and seasonal pricing patterns in some regions. These altered pricing patterns reflect a fundamental shift, and hold important implications for the grid-system value of wind and solar, and for other electric-sector planning and operating decisions

A Review of Renewable Energy Development in PJM

Abstract: As one of the world's largest grid operators, PJM interconnection in the United State leads and promotes renewable energy and greener grid. The growth of solar, wind and other types are significant in recent years, as well as the continuing emergence of energy storage and energy efficiency technologies. All of this new growth is supported by adaptive market rules, stakeholder process, partnerships with industry groups and collaboration with members, state and federal agencies and commissions. With the emerging Smart Grid technologies, the U.S. electrical grid will evolve into a highly advanced, automated and interconnected network. Taking full advantage of renewable sources while dealing with the reliability challenges of the new resources will require a significant change in many aspects in power industry. The overview of the efforts to promote renovation and the ongoing and future renewable energy in PJM footprint is presented in this paper. The current state of art renewable energy development in operation and planning will also be discussed. Some renewable related projects such as on-going renewable integration studies, energy storage batteries and demand response will shed the light of the future trend

The Role of Energy Storage With Renewable Electricity Generation

Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, have vast potential to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions in the electric sector. Climate change concerns, state initiatives including renewable portfolio standards, and consumer efforts are resulting in increased deployments of both technologies. Both solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy have variable and uncertain (sometimes referred to as “intermittent”) output, which are unlike the dispatchable sources used for the majority of electricity generation in the United States. The variability of these sources has led to concerns regarding the reliability of an electric grid that derives a large fraction of its energy from these sources as well as the cost of reliably integrating large amounts of variable generation into the electric grid. Because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine at any given location, there has been an increased call for the deployment of energy storage as an essential component of future energy systems that use large amounts of variable renewable resources. However, this often-characterized “need” for energy storage to enable renewable integration is actually an economic question. The answer requires comparing the options to maintain the required system reliability, which include a number of technologies and changes in operational practices. The amount of storage or any other “enabling” technology used will depend on the costs and benefits of each technology relative to the other available options. To determine the potential role of storage in the grid of the future, it is important to examine the technical and economic impacts of variable renewable energy sources. It is also important to examine the economics of a variety of potentially competing technologies including demand response, transmission, flexible generation, and improved operational practices. In addition, while there are clear benefits of using energy storage to enable greater penetration of wind and solar, it is important to consider the potential role of energy storage in relation to the needs of the electric power system as a whole. In this report, we explore the role of energy storage in the electricity grid, focusing on the effects of large-scale deployment of variable renewable sources (primarily wind and solar energy). We begin by discussing the existing grid and the current role that energy storage has in meeting the constantly varying demand for electricity, as well as the need for operating reserves to achieve reliable service. The impact of variable renewables on the grid is then discussed, including how these energy sources will require a variety of enabling techniques and technologies to reach their full potential. Finally, we evaluate the potential role of several forms of enabling technologies, including energy storage

A Comprehensive Assessment of Vehicle-to-Grid Systems and Their Impact to the Sustainability of Current Energy and Water Nexus

This dissertation aims to explore the feasibility of incorporating electric vehicles into the electric power grid and develop a comprehensive assessment framework to predict and evaluate the life cycle environmental, economic and social impact of the integration of Vehicle-to-Grid systems and the transportation-water-energy nexus. Based on the fact that electric vehicles of different classes have been widely adopted by both fleet operators and individual car owners, the following questions are investigated: 1. Will the life cycle environmental impacts due to vehicle operation be reduced? 2. Will the implementation of Vehicle-to-Grid systems bring environmental and economic benefits? 3. Will there be any form of air emission impact if large amounts of electric vehicles are adopted in a short time? 4. What is the role of the Vehicle-to-Grid system in the transportation-water-energy nexus? To answer these questions: First, the life cycle environmental impacts of medium-duty trucks in commercial delivery fleets are analyzed. Second, the operation mechanism of Vehicle-to-Grid technologies in association with charging and discharging of electric vehicles is researched. Third, the feasible Vehicle-to-Grid system is further studied taking into consideration the spatial and temporal variance as well as other uncertainties within the system. Then, a comparison of greenhouse gas emission mitigation of the Vehicle-to-Grid system and the additional emissions caused by electric vehicle charging through marginal electricity is analyzed. Finally, the impact of the Vehicle-to-Grid system in the transportation-water-energy nexus, and the underlying environmental, economic and social relationships are simulated through system dynamic modeling. The results provide holistic evaluations and spatial and temporal projections of electric vehicles, Vehicle-to-Grid systems, wind power integration, and the transportation-water-energy nexus