POWER December 2020 - 8

Five Emerging Risks That Could
Hamper Energy Transitions
At the virtual 2nd Global Ministerial
Conference on System Integration of
Renewables on Oct. 27, several highranking
policymakers pointed to a number
of localized challenges affecting
their countries' distinctive power systems
and clean energy transitions. But
most agreed that overall, the biggest
threats are entangled within a complex
trilemma-and as some suggest, an impossible
trinity-of ensuring reliability,
affordability, and sustainability.
As he opened the session, Fatih Birol,
executive director of the International
Energy Agency (IEA), described the issue
as a " number one " priority for the
IEA. While the Paris-based intergovernmental
organization was established to
ensure global oil security in the wake
of the 1973 oil crisis, its mission has in
the decades since expanded to gas security.
But ministers had recently asked
the IEA " to keep an eye on electricity
security, " because, though it accounts
for one-fifth of global energy consumption
today, " Electricity is essential for the
functioning of modern societies-as the
COVID-19 crisis has highlighted-and for
bringing down global emissions, " Birol
said. Electricity's role in future energy
systems, meanwhile, is slated to play a
much bigger role in heating, cooling, and
transport, as well as for many digitally
integrated sectors, such as communication,
finance, and healthcare.
In its optimistic sustainable development
scenario, the IEA projects that
electricity could surpass oil as the world's
largest energy source by 2040. Many
countries-specifically those that fall
within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development's (OECD's)
framework-already maintain a high
level of electricity security, owing mainly
to well-endowed
centrally controlled
systems and relatively simple supply
chains. However, recent technology and
policy developments are prompting a
radical change within the electricity security
model that has prevailed for the past
century. Governments and utilities must
recognize these emerging threats to reliability,
Birol said, and update policies,
regulations, and market designs to keep
pace with change. The approach will need
to be broad and integrate technical, economic,
and political levels, he said.
8
1. Net additions of dispatchable generation capacity by technology through 2030. Notes:
STEPS = Stated Policies Scenario; SDS = Sustainable Development Scenario; EU = European
Union; ASEAN = Association of Southeast Asian Nations; and other low carbon includes geothermal,
concentrated solar power, biomass, and marine power. Source: IEA World Energy
Outlook 2019
To drive the point home, the IEA on
Oct. 27 released a first-of-its-kind report
surveying reliability threats in the context
of the varied and intense changes
across the world's power systems.
Especially notable is the IEA's precise
definition of what it considers " electricity
security, " that is, " the electricity system's
capability to ensure uninterrupted
availability of electricity by withstanding
and recovering from disturbances and
contingencies. " The definition, the IEA
said, encapsulates three other crucial
factors: adequacy, or the " ability of the
electricity system to supply the aggregate
electrical demand within an area at
all times under normal operating conditions " ;
operational security, which is
" the ability of the electricity system to
retain a normal state or to return to a
normal state after any type of event as
soon as possible " ; and resilience, or the
" ability of the system and its component
parts to absorb, accommodate and recover
from both short-term shocks and
long-term changes. "
In the report, the IEA highlights three
types of electricity supply interruptions.
These include cascading blackouts, or
black-system events, when an initial outage
causes the system to collapse from
an increasing series of line overloads.
" These events are mostly due to equipment
failure and simultaneous contingencies,
and are very rarely related to
lack of installed generation capacity. Recent
examples are the Hokkaido blackout
in 2018, due to an earthquake, and
the South Australian blackout in 2016,
which ensued from severe storms and
flawed interconnection standards. Load
shedding, a system operator's deliberate
disconnection of electrical power
as a preventative measure to maintain
www.powermag.com
system balance when supply is expected
to be short, is more common. California's
load-shedding event in August
2020 is a prominent example. Finally,
some countries suffer long rationing periods
of electricity because system operators
have to limit power supply on a
planned basis owing to large supply and
demand deficits. South Africa's ongoing
electricity rationing serves as a cautionary
tale of the macroeconomic effects
of unreliable supply.
The IEA, specifically, highlighted five
emerging risks that threaten electricity
security.
A Changing Supply Landscape. As
variable renewable sources like wind and
solar PV become cheaper than thermal
power generation, they are flooding markets
worldwide. But because they are
nonsynchronous generators and do not
bring in system inertia, their growth will
require substantial flexibility in the system
(Figure 1), as well as more elaborate
output forecasting. For added resilience
against physical supply disruptions and
fuel-price fluctuations, the IEA suggested
diversifying power supplies (but leaning
toward low-carbon sources), ramping
up flexibility in supply and demand response.
Meanwhile, though distributed
generators can be more resilient than
centralized systems, operators will also
require greater situation awareness.
To ensure all factors are assessed, the
IEA urged governments to consider the
full slate of electricity complexities as they
affect generation, transmission, and distribution
in planning frameworks. It also
highlighted emerging integrated planning
practices, such as inter-regional planning
across different jurisdictions and balancing
areas; integrated planning across a diversity
of supply and demand resources; and
POWER | December 2020
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K

http://www.powermag.com

POWER December 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER December 2020