The high renewable penetrated power system has severe frequency regulation problems. Distributed resources can provide frequency regulation services but are limited by communication time delay. This paper proposes a communication resources allocation model to reduce communication time delay in frequency regulation service. Communication device resources and wireless spectrum resources are allocated to distributed resources when they participate in frequency regulation. We reveal impact of communication resources allocation on time delay reduction and frequency regulation performance. Besides, we study communication resources allocation solution in high renewable energy penetrated power systems. We provide a case study based on the HRP-38 system. Results show communication time delay decreases distributed resources’ ability to provide frequency regulation service. On the other hand, allocating more communication resources to distributed resources’ communication services improves their frequency regulation performance. For power systems with renewable energy penetration above 70%, required communications resources are about five times as many as 30% renewable energy penetrated power systems to keep frequency performance the same.

Monthly electricity consumption forecasting (ECF) plays an important role in power system operation and electricity market trading. Widespread popularity of smart meters enables collection of fine-grained load data, which provides an opportunity for improvement of monthly ECF accuracy. In this letter, a spatio-temporal granularity co-optimization-based monthly ECF framework is proposed, which aims to find an optimal combination of temporal granularity and spatial clusters to improve monthly ECF accuracy. The framework is formulated as a nested bi-layer optimization problem. A grid search method combined with a greedy clustering method is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Superiority of the proposed method has been verified on a real smart meter dataset.

Integrating variable renewable energy is one of the most effective ways to achieve a low-carbon energy system. The high penetration of variable renewable energy, such as wind power and photovoltaic, increases the challenge of balancing the power system. Energy storage technology is regarded as one of the key technologies for balancing the intermittency of variable renewable energy to achieve high penetration. This study reviews the energy storage technology that can accommodate the high penetration of variable renewable energy. The basic energy storage technologies that can accommodate time-scale variation are reviewed first. The role of energy storage in the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption for the high variable renewable energy penetration system is then analyzed. The supporting energy storage policies in the United States, the United Kingdom and China are summarized. Specific suggestions are proposed from the perspectives of technology, business and policy. This paper provides guidelines for planning energy storage to enable a high variable renewable energy penetration power system.