Systems and control opportunities in the integration of renewable energy into the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid is among the most important and ambitious endeavors of our time. Deep integration of renewable energy sources is one component of the Smart Grid vision. A fundamental difficulty here is that renewable energy sources are highly variable - they are not dispatchable, are intermittent, and uncertain. The electricity grid must absorb this variability through a portfolio of solutions. These include aggregation of variable generation, curtailment, operating reserves, storage technologies, local generation, and distributed demand response. The various elements in this portfolio must be dynamically coordinated based on available information within the framework of electricity grid operations. This, in turn, will require critical technologies and methods drawn from optimization, modeling, and control, which are the core competencies of Systems and Control. This paper catalogues some of these systems and control research opportunities that arise in the deep integration of renewable energy sources.