In December 2014, NREL's Eastern Renewable Generation Integration Study (ERGIS) team worked with more than 20 industry representatives to analyze initial results from the largest renewable energy integration study ever conducted.

 

ERGIS is a multi-year, multi-program-funded project aimed at understanding the operational impacts of high penetrations of wind and solar generation on the Eastern Interconnection. A critical component of understanding these impacts is the creation of a model that can accurately simulate power system operations under a variety of future scenarios. As part of this project, NREL also developed the only existing model that can simulate the entire Eastern Interconnection, which is the largest power system in the world, at a 5-minute resolution with detailed generation and transmission representation. Using advanced high-performance computing tools with the Energy System Integration Facility's Peregrine computing cluster, the research team was able to dramatically increase the modeling resolution while simultaneously reducing computation time from more than 200 days to less than 10 days.