WASHINGTON DC – North American Electric Reliability Corp. expects 500 GW of solar and 400 GW of wind to come online over the next decade, and officials say some work is needed to accommodate the shift away from fossil fuels.
“If we’re going to reliably integrate these resources over the next 10 years, we’ve really got to start now,” said Moura. That will mean additional investment in natural gas infrastructure, he said.
“Gas is a bridge fuel to where I think policies ultimately want to take us,” Director of Reliability Assessment and Performance Analysis John Moura said more investment in gas infrastructure is needed. “Batteries aren’t going to do it, and we’re going to need a backup fuel for wind and solar. So this is important to invest in.”
NERC develops and enforces Reliability Standards; monitors the Bulk-Power System; assesses adequacy annually via a 10-year forecast and winter and summer forecasts; audits owners, operators and users for preparedness; and educates and trains industry personnel.
A failure of gas generation was one reason for outages in Texas last year — along with failures of renewables and coal, and high electricity demand. As a result of that event, the amount of unserved energy due to operator-initiated load shedding “was the highest amount since the [Electric Reliability Organization] Enterprise began reporting this metric and almost one-hundred times higher than the prior year,” the report said.
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