SECOE Workshop - Renewable Energy Grid Integration Workshop 07 - 11 Dec 2015

As world leaders and climate experts worked to forge a climate agreement in Paris during the week of 7-11 December 2015, a total of 49 participants from 15 countries were meeting in Singapore to discuss the technical and policy underpinnings of how to integrate increasingly large amounts of renewable energy generation into the electricity grids of developing Asia. Countries represented at the workshop came from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia.

The five-day workshop was the third in a series of training workshops for Asian developing country professionals on important clean energy topics.  The workshop is an initiative of the Sustainable Energy Center of Excellence (SECOE), launched earlier this year as a partnership between the Asian Development Bank and the Singapore government.

The workshop was designed to build awareness and knowledge about integrating renewable energy into the electricity grids of developing Asian countries.  Given the major drivers of energy security and the need for global action on climate change, the question is not whether RE can be fed into grids in increasing amounts, but how to accomplish this in order to accommodation RE energy targets.

The main questions to be addressed during the workshop were:

• How can electricity grids accommodate increasing amounts of RE, and will the injection of variable RE generation to a grid make it become unstable?
• How much renewable energy can a grid incorporate?
• What are overall strategies and specific technical options for managing grid stability and “flexibility”, in order to facilitate integration of variable RE?
• What are the characteristics of solar and wind energy generation, and what are the strategies for managing the intermittency of their generation?
• What is the role of demand management and demand response in managing variations in electricity supply—whether traditional power or renewable power?