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This is why no one builds small coal plants. Thermal plants – such as coal, nuclear, and natural gas have substantial economies of scale. They can more easily manage local energy flows, and actually provide support to the main grid in the form of demand response, frequency regulation, operating reserves and other ancillary services that contribute to power quality and reliability.Ī solar car park canopy helps power a microgrid at UC San Diego
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Distributed energy resources with storage and load management offer the promise of helping balance the variable nature of renewable energy resources. There’s an emergence of small grid-tied systems – usually solar-plus-storage – as well as microgrids, which can function in either grid-tied or islanded mode. Now that renewable technologies have dropped enough in price to compete with centralized, fossil fuel-based generation, we’re starting to see more innovations in the grid, and in the way that distributed energy resources (DER) are networked and monetized. Renewable energy in general is posing important challenges to the centralized energy production paradigm. Solar power is inherently decentralized because the sun shines everywhere. This vastly increases the efficiency of fossil generation resources. Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants solves that problem by being sized and located so that the majority of their waste heat can be used. In fuel-burning power plants, most of the energy in the fuel ends up as waste heat, but the majority of these large power plants are too large and too far from potential thermal loads to make use of an economically significant portion of this heat. The traditional electric power system has been based, for about 100 years, on large centralized power plants. Partially driven by concerns about carbon emissions and partly by economics, we are now in an era when people can choose different technologies depending on their local natural resources and specific state or local financial incentives. Now, with the proliferation of new renewable energy and storage technologies, diversity is exploding. Diversity is a key contributor to a more resilient system. In recent years, new capacity additions were primarily gas, then wind, and now solar. For a long time, the electric power sector was dominated by coal and nuclear plants.