And check out some of the earlier papers from this 3-year research effort below, also open-access:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

One of the key outcomes of peer review was to think more about how storage degradation might impact the calculus of the above findings. You'll have to download the full paper to find out! 🙂

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

💡 Allowing grid charging largely eliminates need to hold storage in reserve.

💡 Higher reserve levels may increase total customer value for customers with an exceptionally high value of lost load, living in areas with exceptionally frequent power interruptions

💡 Total customer value tends to be greatest when reserves are set as low as allowed

💡 Reliability value is (surprisingly) insensitive to storage reserve level under most conditions.

💡 Bill savings drop precipitously with higher storage reserves

This study evaluates a key operational tradeoff for homeowners: the more storage capacity held in reserve, the greater the customer’s ability to ride through power interruptions, but less capacity is then available to manage utility bills on a day-to-day basis. Key highlights:

Lots of interesting findings in the paper, and still much more to do to in this area of work.

Check it out: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

In some cases, we found that it would be most valuable for electricity to flow only one direction. However, in many cases, especially for interregional lines, we found a more balanced situation where its valuable for electricity to flow different directions at different times.

We can identify factors that commonly occur during the hours in which Trans is highly valuable. “Unforeseen intraday variation,” which means there was either a sizeable error in a day-ahead forecast or an unexpected infrastructure outage, is particularly correlated with value!

We use recorded wholesale market prices to answer questions of where, when, and why additional TX would or would not have been valuable, and include new methods to estimate potential TX market values and compare these value estimate to independently published cost estimates.

For even more information, see our landmark research on the interconnection queues, in the report Queued Up. Find also recorded webinars, interactive data sets, and more, at https://buff.ly/3E9tY1q.

And as always, please reach out to our team if you have any questions!

A big factor is the cost of network upgrades, which are often billed to project developers to overcome transmission constraints. The wide range of interconnection costs across the country and by situation illustrates the uncertainty and lack of uniformity of the process.

Interconnection costs have risen over time. Projects withdrawn in recent years had costs 23% greater than the preceding 5 years and more than double those before 2014. Costs are much greater for withdrawn projects ($373/kW) than for those that completed iX studies ($73/kW)

Massive growth in interest to develop new generation technologies has led to the queue backlog. Since 2010 the queue has grown >5X and the process length has doubled.

This allows us to better understand the dynamics and what solutions may be available. See some of our key findings summarized below 👇👇

Our team at LBNL has been analyzing and assessing the massive backlog for grid interconnection for awhile now, collecting data on both the costs and the backlog but always analyzing them separately. In the new article we aim to combine all of our data into one analysis narrative!