PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is proud to launch a new webinar series, hosting the Laboratory’s foremost experts in grid resilience to extreme weather, from planning to response and recovery.

This new series focused on our Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) and the datasets and tools readily available to help planners, operators, investors, academics, concerned scientists, and the public take steps toward deep decarbonization.

The following deep dive webinars in this series provided detailed descriptions of the science behind the capabilities and show you how to access and use tools and datasets based on a range of technical questions from high-level planning to siting and sizing assets. At each session, technical leads addressed questions and were available to provide assistance with the platform. These free webinars are an excellent opportunity to gain insights and interact with our experts in grid reslience.

All webinars are available on our PNNL YouTube channel dedicated to grid resilience. You can watch them here.

GridResilience@PNNL Presents the GODEEEP Webinar Series: Overview of New Capabilities for Climate- and Equity-Informed Energy Resilience Planning

Monday, June 12, 2023, 10:00 a.m. PT (1:00 p.m. ET)  

This first webinar in this series focused on our Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) and the datasets and tools readily available to help planners, operators, investors, academics, concerned scientists, and the public take steps toward deep decarbonization

CLICK TO WATCH OR REVIEW THE PRESENTATION MATERIALS.

Deep Dive One – Decarbonization and Climate Impacts on Hourly Electricity Load Projections

Monday, June 26, 2023, 10:00 a.m. PT (1:00 p.m. ET)

A core element of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL’s) GODEEEP initiative is to advance the science of long-term hourly load projections under decarbonization, considering climate change, electrification, and their interactions. In this webinar, we will discuss the novel methods we use to generate hourly projections under decarbonization, considering climate change, electrification, and their interactions. In this webinar, we will discuss the novel methods we use to generate hourly electricity load projections that can be used to assess grid reliability and resilience under decarbonization and climate change. 

CLICK TO WATCH or review the Presentation materials.

Deep Dive Two – Incorporating Socioeconomic and Natural Resources Impacts into New Infrastructure Siting  

Monday, July 10, 2023, 10:00 a.m. PT (1:00 p.m. ET) 

This webinar will showcase a deep dive into how the GODEEEP platform models power plant siting for capacity expansion planning and for coordination with grid operations modeling. Specifically, we will present the siting of wind, solar, and other technology buildouts through 2035 at a 1 km² resolution under a decarbonized grid in comparison to a business-as-usual scenario. During the webinar, attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of the GODEEEP power plant siting workflow, including how climate impacts, interconnection costs, locational marginal energy prices, and societal factors, such as disadvantaged communities, and “on-the-ground” constraints, such as protected lands, are incorporated in the modeling.

CLICK TO WATCH or review the presentation materials. 

Deep Dive Three – Vulnerability of the Decarbonized Grid to Energy Droughts and Climate Extremes 

Monday, July 24, 2023, 10:00 a.m. PT (1:00 p.m. ET)

As we move towards a decarbonized grid, reliance on weather-dependent energy increases as does exposure to extreme events and prolonged natural resource shortages known as energy droughts. A core element of PNNL’s GODEEEP initiative is to advance the science of developing coincident wind, solar, and load datasets considering an evolving infrastructure and changing climate conditions. These datasets are aimed at addressing long-term planning questions and benchmarking the properties of energy droughts and renewable generation during extreme events at scales relevant for reliability studies and storage sizing. In this webinar, we will first discuss the development of a dataset of historical hourly wind and solar generation for every plant within the United States that is part of the Energy Information Administration 860 database. The data uses regional atmospheric climate model simulations from 1980-2019 and wind and solar power plant configurations across the entire contiguous US. From this data, we examine the response of wind and solar generation under extreme temperatures as well as conduct a standardized benchmark of the frequency, duration, magnitude, and seasonality of energy droughts at a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Results are presented for 15 Balancing Authorities, regions of the U.S. power grid where wind and solar are must-take resources by the power grid and must be balanced. This webinar will focus on the methodology and results of this work as well as discuss ways this information can be used to improve grid reliability. We will show how those datasets can be accessed and show how this research is already being used to select and design extreme events to inform long-term planning.

click to WATCH or review the presentation materials.

Deep Dive Four – Decarbonization Impacts on Disadvantaged Communities   

Monday, August 7, 2023, 10:00 a.m. PT (1:00 p.m. ET)

Ambitious climate policy requires major energy sector transitions, affecting producers, suppliers, and consumers. Policymakers must consider how to achieve clean energy goals not only from the production side, but also in a way that maintains safe, affordable, and reliable electricity for all consumers. In Deep Dive 4 of the GODEEEP webinar series, we share our comprehensive approach to understanding decarbonization impacts on overall human well-being, while focusing on how those impacts are distributed across various population groups. Specifically, we explore the impacts on residential energy security and economic security at various scales. In this seminar, we will start with the development of state-level, post-tax income distribution projections and census block-level projections of population and income, which are necessary for modeling equity impacts on different population groups across various spatial scales. We will then present our modeling efforts to capture the impacts on decarbonization on residential energy security metrics, looking at impacts across different economic groups at the state level. Subsequently, we'll present the impacts on decarbonization on jobs and income at the U.S. census block level, with our initial analysis focused on the state of Washington. Finally, we will demonstrate the Environmental Justice Visualization Impacts and Analysis tool, which allows stakeholders to explore impacts across these multiple metrics and scales.

Click to watch.

PNNL experts develop and deploy tools to make informed decisions that consider the pressures of climate change, an increasing global population, and growing water and energy demands. Stay connected and sign up for the PNNL Grid-Resilience-Decarbonization newsletter.