Amidst the political battle over whether wind and solar power is destabilizing the nation’s electric grid, it’s important to remember that utility-scale renewables can also be resources for grid stability — as long as the technical, regulatory and economic issues can be hammered out.
Over the past year or so, First Solar, California grid operator CAISO, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have been testing out how a 300-megawatt solar farm in the Mojave Desert can provide grid frequency regulation, voltage and reactive power control, and other valuable grid-balancing tasks.
