Power System Challenges toward Renewable Energies’ Integration

Dear Colleagues,

Currently, the energy sector is undergoing a transformation which is leading to significant structural changes on both global and local scales. To ensure a smooth transformation process, a key challenge is the integration of an increasingly larger share of intermittent, less controllable renewable energy sources and decreasing share of centralized, controllable conventional thermal power plants. The goal is to ensure availability of affordable, sustainable, and modern energy supply without compromising the reliability and security of supply.

Renewable energy sources provide a wide range of benefits, including great potential for mitigating the effects of climate change, such as reducing both environmental pollution and negative impacts on human health. In addition, the continuous use of renewable sources will contribute to socioeconomic development, the availability of additional energy sources, resource conservation, and energy security. Despite the above advantages, the implementation phase of renewable energy still faces various obstacles, the most important of which are:

1. In many cases still, renewable energy sources are more expensive than traditional energy sources, since their development and implementation depends on various forms of direct and indirect investments. As a result, market distortion of goods and resources could lead to ineffective use of limited economic resources;
2. Another important issue is the unpredictable and intermittent character of energy generation, leading to electricity balancing challenges and more volatile and less predictable physical flows in the power grid. The increased volatility requires substantial improvements in regional coordination among transmission system operations as well as increased coordination between transmission and distribution system operators in grid development planning and system operation;
3. Additionally, a variety of target indicators of energy efficiency challenge monitoring and assessment mechanisms—for example, insufficiently organized systems of statistical data collection, missing mechanisms for both updating and achieving medium-term objectives, insufficiently developed systems of regulations and standards, as well as missing mechanisms to stimulate investments in energy efficiency;
4. Frequency regulation and decreasing system inertia is a growing challenge as renewable generation replaces conventional thermal power plants—for instance, maintaining the sustainability of energy power systems by disabling many installations, ensuring the reliability of power supply, upgrading the distribution network, considering reverse power flows, and many other control measures driving system operator tasks in terms of planning and conducting power system regimes;
5. Finally, the effect of renewable energies on the operation of the end-user sector, for instance, aviation, shipping, industry, heavy transport, etc., requires serious study.

The issue is aimed toward problems related to the integration of renewable energy sources into both large and small power energy systems. This consideration includes renewable sourses’ influence on the intelligent network construction and the energy market design, also assessing the impact of distributed generation increase on the energy power system stability and reliability, the behavior of distributed generation in the presence of disturbances in the energy system, and many other factors. We believe that the results of analytical, experimental or numerical studies of scientists all over the world, which shall become available to a wide audience through the open access journal Sustainability, will help to solve the abovementioned problems.

Prof. Dr. Inga Zicmane
Guest Editor

Dr. Gatis Junghans
Dr. Svetlana Beryozkina
Dr. Sergey Kovalenko
Co-Guest Editors

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