Renewable energy integration: Opportunities and challenges

Renewable energy (RE) is staring to be used as the panacea for solving current climate change or global warming threats. Therefore, government, utilities and research communities are working together to integrate large-scale RE into the power grid. However, there are a number of potential challenges in integrating RE with the existing grid. The major potential challenges are as follows: unpredictable power generation, week grid system and impacts on power quality (PQ) and reliability. This chapter investigates the potential challenges in integrating RE as well as distributed energy resources (DERs) with the smart power grid including the possible deployment issues for a sustainable future both nationally and internationally. Initially, the prospects of RE with their possible deployment issues were investigated. Later, a prediction model was proposed that informs the typical variation in energy generation as well as effect on grid integration using regression algorithms. This chapter also investigates the potential challenges in integrating RE into the grid through experimental and simulation analyses. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.