Presenters: Lina Ramirez, Yonghong Chen, Seong Choi – National Renewable Energy Laboratory
This presentation provides an in-depth look at power system planning, cross-border electricity trading, and battery energy storage systems (BESS), offering actionable insights for system operators, regulators, and policymakers. It begins with an overview of capacity expansion models and resource adequacy studies, focusing on their role in optimizing efficiency, managing emissions, and addressing reliability risks. Key considerations include integrating transmission into generation planning, balancing forecasting and optimization of distributed energy resources (DER), assessing trade-offs between spatial granularity and model runtimes, and evaluating the feasibility of aligning distribution investments with capacity expansion.
The presentation then examines cross-border electricity trading, with a focus on reliability metrics such as loss of load expectation (LOLE) and planning reserve margins (PRM). Case studies from U.S. regional markets highlight reserve market design, coordination to improve deliverability, management of interregional power balance and congestion, and market-to-market strategies for congestion management, including high-voltage direct current (HVDC) optimization and ancillary service delivery.
The final section covers the rapid evolution of BESS, including operational growth, regulatory frameworks, and applications for flexibility, reliability, and renewable integration. It outlines the benefits of BESS for system stability and resilience, common use cases in grid operations, and performance factors such as throughput, round-trip efficiency, and state of charge.