Integration Costs: Are They Unique to Wind and Solar Energy? Preprint

Over the past several years, there has been considerable interest in assessing wind integration costs. This is understandable because wind energy does increase the variability and uncertainty that must be managed on a power system. However, there are other sources of variability and uncertainty that also must be managed in the power system. This paper describes some of these sources and showsthat even the introduction of base-load generation can cause additional ramping and cycling. The paper concludes by demonstrating that integration costs are not unique to wind and solar, and should perhaps instead be assessed by power plant and load performance instead of technology type.