Nodal-curtailment-analysis

Repository for the paper: "A First Look at Node-Level Curtailment of Renewable Energy and its Implications (PDF)"

Authors: Diptyaroop Maji, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, Ramesh K Sitaraman
Affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

0. Disclaimer

If something is not working, please check whether some recent update has already fixed that.
In case something is not working in the latest version, or if there are any doubts/questions/suggestions, please feel free to reach us at dmaji at cs dot umass dot edu.

1. Data Sources (ERCOT grid)

Nodal electricity generation & HSL data: 60-Day SCED Disclosure Reports

ERCOT grid-wide electricity generation data: EIA hourly grtid monitor

LMP data: LMPs by Resource Nodes, Load Zones and Trading Hubs

Node location data: US Solar Photovoltaic Database, US Wind Turbine Database, EIA Power Plant Database, ERCOT Monthly Resource Adequacy Report, Global Energy Monitor Tracker (Solar, Wind)

Population density data: US Census Bureau

2. Background on Curtailment

Renewable energy curtailment events occur when solar or wind nodes have the capability to generate electricity, but the grid operator instructs them to operate below capacity. A curtailment event has two aspects --- curtailment amount (in MWh) and curtailment duration (in hours). Curtailments can be due to the oversupply or grid congestion.

Mathematically,

Curtailment (in MWh) = (HSL (in MW) - Actual Output (in MW)) x Duration (in hrs)

3. Our Results and Datasets

All the results are available in the nodal-curtailment.ipynb notebook. The relevant datasets are available in the data/ folder.

4. Developer Mode

We welcome users to suggest new data sources (for other regions) and analyses that we have missed. Please feel free to contact us at dmaji at cs dot umass dot edu with suggestions or new datasets.

5. Citing Our Paper

If you use our analyses/dataset for your work, please consider citing our paper. The BibTex format is as follows:
       @inproceedings{maji2025curtailment,
        title={A First Look at Node-Level Curtailment of Renewable Energy and its Implications},
        author={Maji, Diptyaroop and Irwin, David and Shenoy, Prashant and Sitaraman, Ramesh K},
        booktitle={Proceedings of 16th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy 2025)},
        pages={},
        year={2025}
       }

6. Acknowledgements

This work is part of the CoDec project, supported by NSF grants CNS-2105494, CNS-2325956, 23091241, 2213636, 2211302, and 2211888, DOE grant DEEE0010143, and a grant from VMware.