Report
With an eye toward decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, electric utilities are increasingly deploying directly or supporting others to deploy more and more renewable generation assets. Although there are cases where renewable electricity is being generated by solar thermal systems, the dominant renewable energy generation technologies being used today include both photovoltaic (PV) and wind energy. Although the generation of electricity from renewable energy sources displaces the consumption of fossil fuels, it creates a number of significant challenges for utilities. By its very nature, the production of electricity from renewable energy generation sources is intermittent and often not directly correlated with the demand for electricity. Because utilities need to dynamically produce electricity to meet coincident demands as they occur, utilities have not experienced benefits of reducing their traditional generation assets as their renewable energy portfolios have grown.