Balancing Authority Cooperation Concepts to Reduce Variable Generation Integration Costs in the Western Interconnection: Consolidating Balancing Authorities and Sharing Balancing Reserves

The study described in this chapter demonstrates the benefits of BA consolidation with the help of a detailed WECC system model and advanced methodology, which is also described in this chapter. The study aims to determine the potential savings in production cost and reduction in balancing reserve requirements in the WECC system. The study has found that effective use of the diversity in load and variable generation over a wide area can indeed help to achieve significant savings. The implementation cost for the consolidation was beyond the scope of this study. The analysis was performed for two different scenarios of VG penetration: 11% (8% wind and 3% solar) and 33% (24% wind and 9% solar) of WECC projected energy demand in 2020.