Curtailment (electricity)

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In the electric power industry, curtailment is an involuntary reduction of the electric generator output ("dispatch down") made to maintain the grid stability (for example, for the grid balancing). While curtailment is a standard technique that had been applied throughout the history of electric power production, in the 21st century it became an economic issue for the owners of wind and solar generators. These variable renewable energy plants, due to the absence of an expendable resource (like fuel), have quite low marginal cost of the electricity production, so curtailment affects the economics of the project in a much more significant way than in the case of conventional units. [1]

Contents

Curtailment is a loss of potentially useful energy, and may impact power purchase agreements. [2] [3] However, using all available energy may require costly methods such as building new power lines or storage, becoming more expensive than letting surplus power go unused. [4] [5] [6] [7]

Examples

After ERCOT built a new transmission line from the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone in West Texas to the central cities in the Texas Interconnection in 2013, curtailment was reduced from 8-16% to near zero. [8]

Curtailment of wind power in western China was around 20% in 2018. [9]

In 2018, curtailment in the California grid was 460 GWh, or 0.2% of generation. [10] Curtailment has since increased [4] [11] to 150-300 GWh/month in spring of 2020 and 2021, [12] [13] mainly solar power at noon as part of the duck curve. [14]

In Hawaii, curtailment reached 20% on the island of Maui in Hawaii in the second and third quarters of 2020. [15]

In Ireland, 1.2 TWh of wind power was curtailed in 2022. [16] In United Kingdom, 1.35 TWh of wind power was curtailed in early 2023. [17] In Australia, 4.5 TWh of solar and wind power was curtailed in 2024. [18]

From October 2022 to September 2024, 2.9% of solar power in Spain was curtailed. [19]

Mitigation options

References

  1. ↑ Bird, Cochran & Wang 2014, p. iv.
  2. ↑ "How to Manage Curtailment in a Virtual Power Purchase Agreement". LevelTen Energy. 13 February 2019. Archived from the original on 7 August 2020.
  3. ↑ St. John, Jeff (26 November 2019). "Do Preventative Blackouts Put California's Renewable Generators at Risk?". www.greentechmedia.com. Archived from the original on 10 August 2020. PG&E will effectively shut down projects during public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events, and then not pay the developer for the lost production
  4. 1 2 3 Specht, Mark (25 June 2019). "Renewable Energy Curtailment 101: The Problem That's Actually Not a Problem At All". Union of Concerned Scientists . Archived from the original on 1 September 2020. In most cases, it simply does not make economic sense to build all the infrastructure (e.g. transmission lines or energy storage) that would be required to utilize every last drop of renewable electricity
  5. ↑ Elliott, Dave (10 July 2019). "Curtailment: losing green power". Physics World. Archived from the original on 7 August 2020.
  6. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-08-22. Retrieved 2020-10-22.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  7. ↑ "Curtailment of low-cost renewables a cost-effective alternative to 'seasonal' energy storage". Clean Power Research. 13 February 2019. Archived from the original on 13 August 2020.
  8. 1 2 Wiser, Ryan H., and Mark Bolinger. "2014 Wind Technologies Market Report" page 38. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , August 2015.
  9. ↑ Fairley, Peter (21 February 2019). "China's Ambitious Plan to Build the World's Biggest Supergrid". IEEE Spectrum . Archived from the original on 20 August 2021.
  10. ↑ Victor, David G. (21 May 2019). "Pumped Energy Storage: Vital to California's Renewable Energy Future" (PDF). pp. 4, 12–15.
  11. ↑ "California ISO - Managing Oversupply". www.caiso.com. Archived from the original on 14 October 2020.
  12. ↑ Hornyak, Tim (1 November 2020). "An $11 trillion global hydrogen energy boom is coming. Here's what could trigger it". CNBC . Archived from the original on 20 May 2021.
  13. ↑ Aniti, Lori (24 August 2021). "California's curtailments of solar electricity generation continue to increase - Today in Energy - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)". www.eia.gov. Archived from the original on 25 August 2021.
  14. 1 2 Pyper, Julia (9 May 2019). "Electric Ridesharing Benefits the Grid, and EVgo Has the Data to Prove It". www.greentechmedia.com. Archived from the original on 18 October 2020. the cumulative annual load profile by hour of LDV fleets using its fast charging network — with rideshare vehicles currently making up the lion's share on a gigawatt-hour basis — aligns with the cumulative solar curtailment by hour on the CAISO system
  15. ↑ "Renewable Energy". www.hawaiianelectric.com. Archived from the original on 15 September 2021.
  16. ↑ Parkes, Rachel (8 March 2023). "Wind-rich Ireland 'could make Europe's cheapest green hydrogen'". rechargenews.com.
  17. ↑ "Orsted, Highview Power sign storage pact". reNEWS - Renewable Energy News. 6 April 2023.
  18. ↑ "Snowy Hydro-worth of solar and wind wasted in 2024, as curtailment continues to bite". RenewEconomy. 4 February 2025.
  19. ↑ Molina, Pilar Sanchez (1 July 2025). "Batteries with 200 Wh storage per kW of solar capacity could mitigate curtailment in Spain". Energy Storage.
  20. ↑ Chelmis, Charalampos; Saeed, Muhammad Rizwan; Frincu, Marc; Prasanna, Viktor (14 July 2015). "Curtailment Estimation Methods for Demand Response: Lessons Learned by Comparing Apples to Oranges" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Sixth International Conference on Future Energy Systems. pp. 217–218. doi:10.1145/2768510.2775332. ISBN   9781450336093. S2CID   16488954 . Retrieved 9 November 2022.
  21. ↑ Zheng, Jiajia; Chien, Andrew A.; Suh, Sangwon (October 2020). "Mitigating Curtailment and Carbon Emissions through Load Migration between Data Centers". Joule. 4 (10): 2208–2222. doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2020.08.001 . S2CID   225188834. load migration within the existing data center capacity during the curtailment hours in CAISO has the potential to reduce 113–239 KtCO 2e per year of GHG emissions and absorb up to 62% of the total curtailment with negative abatement costs in 2019

Sources

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