Managing Solar Photovoltaic Integration in the Western United States Appendix: Reference and High Solar Photovoltaic Scenarios for Three Regions

This slide deck is an appendix to a paper series that examines potential challenges related to planning future power systems with higher solar photovoltaic (PV) penetrations. The series uses the western U.S. power system for these investigations because it is a region the authors and their colleagues have already extensively studied. We are therefore well-suited to analyze even higher PV penetrations and then examine the results in multiple models to determine whether our current approaches are missing key details that only emerge at higher PV penetrations. This deck details the systems underlying those analyses and how they were modeled using the Resource Planning Model (RPM), a capacity expansion modeling tool. We examine both Western Interconnection-wide and regional results for three regions in the Western U.S. with significantly different existing power systems and connections to neighboring regions; this provides a more balanced picture as to how power systems with high PV penetration might emerge in different contexts and what the resulting grid challenges, if any, might be.