Integrating Renewable Energy with the Grid

Abstract

The ability to harness, capture, and effectively consume energy has been a big topic of interest in the past few decades. Increasing global population and energy demand is driving the need for new and innovative ways to generate, store, and transmit energy from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, many of these energy sources are based on fossil fuels that release harmful greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere when burned. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), electricity and heat production accounted for 25% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 (See Figure 1). With increasing policies and agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future, we cannot rely on these fossil fuel sources alone to generate electricity and heat. Renewable and sustainable energy generation includes things like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and biomass. One of the key advantages of these is they offer a promising low-carbon energy source for the future. But these types of energy generation have been around for a long time and still only made up about 13% of U.S. energy generation in 2015, while fossil fuel sources such as coal and natural gas made up about 66% (See 2 2). About 6% is hydropower and about another 5% is wind, which means all of the other renewable sources, including solar, are encompassed in the remaining 2̃%. This is a very small portion of our energy supply that we need to increase greatly in the next few decades in order to ensure sustainable and reliable power in the future as well as