Is it possible to have too much fun? I doubt it. Not too long ago, I was web surfing, trying to track down some information on photovoltaics (PV). The search engine came up with something shiny, which of course caught my attention, and PV was forgotten. It was a piece from one of those self-help gurus. You guessed it: Gene has no adult supervision when web surfing.

Well, Mr. Guru was waxing on about “You can't have fun at your work.” He went further to say that it is especially true if you want to be successful. Personally, I rank that sort of thinking at the top of my balderdash list.

It Has Been a Blast

To be honest, putting this supplement together has been more than fun, it's been downright stimulating. Actually, overstimulated would better to describe my condition as I discovered solar and wind facilities that are becoming humongous in size. And they are becoming extremely complex as well. How about an offshore wind farm that stretches more than 350 miles and will generate 6 GW of electricity? Yet 6 GW is exactly what is planned for off the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

And what about a solar farm the size of the country of Wales but located in the Sahara Desert that will power all of Europe? I'll have to see to believe.

Overstimulated by SNL

I called my friend Dr. Abraham Ellis at the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) solar research facilities to discuss this trend toward bigness and complexity. Abe and I go back to college where we were New Mexico State Aggies. Abe made some calls, I signed some forms, and soon I was walking SNL's grounds, checking out the field tests and talking with research scientists (actually listening very intently). This pushed me into stimulus overload, but what fun!

Did you know that PV solar panels feed direct current directly into a centralized inverter? That much I knew. But I hadn't considered that the impedance of each of the circuits directly impacts the amount of electricity generated. Because no two PV panels are identical (even from the same manufacturer and factory), the impedance mismatch must be addressed. I also learned that solar panel impedances drift with age. Now, consider a solar farm with hundreds of thousands of panels spread over thousands of acres. If someone could improve the impedance control at or near the panels, they could increase the output of the solar farm. Well, SNL is working with manufacturers to improve this technology and test the results.

SNL has a test facility that simulates PV-generated power — and it can do it 24/7 — so it is independent of when the actual sun is shining. Without going into a lot of detail, current and voltage waveforms produced by PVs are totally different than power supplied by, say, a battery. SNL can mimic the output of a PV panel and simulate any parameters needed for the test circuit. This has placed SNL at the forefront of solar technology testing. Today, SNL is in great demand by manufacturers of hardware being used in solar farms.

EPRI and DOE Provide More Inspiration

The Electrical Power Research Institute and the Department of Energy sponsor a joint renewable energy conference every two years. It moves around the globe, and as luck would have it, it took place in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2010.

My friends Nadav Enbar and Don Kintner from EPRI invited me to attend the conference, a nonstop five-day affair with workshops, tours and presentations focused on wind, solar and energy storage. They even went into government regulations, but I skipped that session as there was too much technology to track. The event was international as well, with speakers from 15 countries on six continents.

Technology-specific discussions were very pointed. Consider that wind farms are designed to have roughly 15 MW to 20 MW on each feeder in the collector system. This has worked well when wind farm ratings were 100 MW to 200 MW in total output. But what issues will designers face on a 1,000-MW wind farm? How do they limit currents and short circuits to manageable levels while maintaining control over the collector station?

The same concerns are popping up in the large PV-powered solar farms. Many utility-scale solar facilities were created taking designs from commercial PV installations of around 50 kW. Now developers are expanding these commercial designs to accommodate 50-MW PV solar farms. The bigger PV solar farms seem to be working adequately, but one hears disturbing instances of growing pains related to electronic power conversion and control. And all of this before we scale up into PV facilities with ratings of 500 MW or more.

Wind and solar technologies are still developing, and we have a front-row seat. Would I bet against us figuring out how to build mega utility-scale renewable facilities? No way. But let's place renewables where they make sense. Let's make sure we can provide robust controls and connections to the grid. And let's be sure we have the capacity to handle the coming generation by adding the right mix of energy-storage and customer load-control solutions. If we fail to properly plan, design, construct and connect our utility-scale green generating facilities, today's overstimulation will turn into tomorrow's nightmares. And I wouldn't like that one little bit.