Quantifying Technical Diversity Benefits of Wind as a Distributed Energy Resource

Distributed energy resources are increasingly used in power distribution systems and microgrids. State policy makers are becoming more concerned with renewable energy and resilience. Diversifying variable renewable resources (e.g., by combining wind with solar) can increase renewable energy usage efficiency and improve system resilience. However, when grid optimization and resilience studies consider multiple renewable resources, diversity benefits are usually captured only implicitly in the results of location-specific economic optimization. In this paper, metrics are introduced to express the technical value of resource diversity independent of jurisdiction-specific market structures. Specifically, marginal energy usage efficiency metrics are developed to quantify the ability of new distributed generation to produce useful energy and an incremental sustainable ride-through metric is developed to express improvement in grid outage ride-through capability. While there are economic implications for each of these metrics, the metrics themselves are technically-driven and could be used as components of a technical figure of merit to inform policy actions. Each of these metrics is demonstrated using balance-of-energy simulations that highlight the benefits of improving resource diversity.