By Jared Sagoff
Because of its vastness, complexity, and indispensability, the American power grid presents a number of different challenges to state utility commissions, legislators, energy utilities and researchers who wish to study and improve it.
As part of this effort, states and the electric utility industry are working to incorporate a greater percentage of clean energy resources that power the grid – ranging from cleaner coal technologies, nuclear and natural gas to energy resources like solar, wind, waterpower, geothermal and biomass …
…Recently, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new software tool called the Energy Zones (EZ) Mapping Tool that will help EISPC members identify geographic areas suitable for the development of clean energy resources, which are renewables, natural gas, coal carbon sequestration, and nuclear. Certain forms of energy storage are also included…
“The goal of the project is to provide stakeholders with the ability to identify geographic areas with higher densities of clean energy resources, which could potentially provide a significant amount of new power generation in the future,” said Argonne energy systems engineer Vladimir Koritarov. “This would also provide important information for transmission planning.” …
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