Emerging hybrid renewable energy systems offer 1) new opportunities for the global renewable energy industry with disruptive market potential, and 2) a scalable, economic, and reliable solution applicable to a power system of any size (e.g., large interconnected power systems, islands, microgrids). The project will result in development of a New National Asset – a grid-scale hybrid system test bed that can be used by the industry and research community for validation and demonstration of new control concepts, stakeholder engagement, workforce education, and as a validation platform for future standardization of hybrid technologies. It will lead to both technology and vendor neutral, “plug-and-play” hybridization guidelines and control architecture openly available at all segment of stakeholder community. This project proposes a pioneering approach to demonstrate how technology hybridization can fully leverage the value of variable utility-scale wind and solar PV generation in combination with hydro power generation to take them from a simple variable-energy resources to ones that provide dispatchability, flexibility and capacity services (similar to conventional power plants) and a full range of reliability and resiliency services (similar to or better than conventional plants) to the bulk power system. The project will demonstrate the ability of hybrid plants to operate in grid-forming mode and provide reliability and resilience services (black start, islanded operation) in a multi-MW scale system.
