U.S. Test System with High Spatial and Temporal Resolution for Renewable Integration Studies

Abstract

Planning for power systems with high penetrations of variable renewable energy requires higher spatial and temporal granularity. However, most publicly available test systems are of insufficient fidelity for developing methods and tools for high- resolution planning. This paper presents methods to construct open-access test systems of high spatial granularity to more accurately represent current infrastructure and high temporal granularity to represent variability of demand and renewable resources.

To demonstrate, a high-resolution test system representing the United States is created using only publicly available data. This test system is validated by running it in a production cost model, with results validated against historical generation to ensure that they are representative. The resulting open source test system can support power system transition planning and aid in development of tools to answer questions around how best to reach decarbonization goals, using the most effective combinations of transmission expansion, renewable generation, and energy storage.

Documentation of dataset development

A paper describing the process of developing the dataset is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06155. Please cite as: Y. Xu, Nathan Myhrvold, Dhileep Sivam, Kaspar Mueller, Daniel J. Olsen, Bainan Xia, Daniel Livengood, Victoria Hunt, Benjamin Rouillé d'Orfeuil, Daniel Muldrew, Merrielle Ondreicka, Megan Bettilyon, "U.S. Test System with High Spatial and Temporal Resolution for Renewable Integration Studies," 2020 IEEE PES General Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 2020.

Dataset version history

• 0.1, January 31, 2020: initial data upload.
• 0.2.0, March 10, 2020: addition of Tabular Data Package metadata, modifications to cost curves and transmission capacities aimed at more closely matching optimization results to historical data.
  • 0.2.1, March 25, 2020: [erroneous upload]
  • 0.2.2, March 26, 2020: [erroneous upload]
  • 0.2.3, March 31, 2020: corrected a bug in the wind profile generation process which was pulling the wrong locations for wind farms outside the Western Interconnection.
  • 0.2.4, April 15, 2020: added ramp rate limits to fossil fuel generators.
• 0.3.0, June 23, 2020: Scaling cost curves to more produce LMPs which are more reflective of historical market prices, updating the set of back-to-back HVDC converter stations to be more reflective of current capacities/locations, miscellaneous data fixes to a few erroneous cost curve and heat rate curve parameters.
• 0.4.0, January 19, 2021: updated the base grid to include generators added in the years 2017-2019, added hypothetical offshore wind generators and power profiles at 1 MW capacities, added a .mat file representing the 'base' grid for use with REISE.jl, added several sets of input files which simulate the 'current' (2020) grid, as well as potential future grids for the year 2030.
  • 0.4.1, February 3, 2021: corrected malformed .mat files
  • 0.4.2, February 3, 2021: corrected non-zero minimum generation for some solar/wind generators in base grid