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March 18, 2019

NERC CCC Briefs: March 12, 2019

WASHINGTON — After 12 years as the FERC-delegated Electric Reliability Organization, it’s time for NERC to reconsider its approach, General Counsel Charles Berardesco told the Compliance and Certification Committee (CCC) last week.

About 50 utility and RTO officials and NERC staff attended the Compliance and Certification Committee meeting at Edison Electric Institute headquarters in D.C. last week. | © *RTO Insider*

“The way the grid operates is dramatically different from the way we thought about it. … We have to look at the changing nature of the industry and think about being more proactive about those changes,” he said. “So, does everything go to a standard? … Is there another approach? Are assessments enough? Is it enough for NERC to just raise its hand and say, ‘Whoa! Here’s the issue. You should be worrying about this’? Do we need to do something in between?”

About 50 committee members and NERC staff attended the March 12 meeting at Edison Electric Institute (EEI) headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. (See related story, NERC Survey Highlights Alignment, Transparency Concerns.)

In addition to the routine “blocking and tackling” of consistently implementing its risk-based Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program (CMEP), Berardesco said, “We need to continue to enhance our expertise on assessing the grid’s overall reliability. We need to continue to build better data streams and build analytic capabilities inside of NERC [with] the industry.”

Berardesco noted that NERC’s Regional Entities will be reduced from seven to six effective July 1 when the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council (FRCC) is scheduled to be merged into SERC Reliability.

“Those regions, for the first time, will be about the same size and the same scope. We also have some new leadership in the regions. So, I think it’s an opportunity, a moment in time, to think about roles and responsibilities in a different way at the ERO to ensure we’re actually using our resources most effectively and efficiently and focusing our efforts on reliability, not just process,” he said. “I think what it means is thinking about the ERO as one organization, not seven different entities. And that’s a lot of the work that’s going to be going on in the next couple years at NERC.”

Delivering an update on the Reliability Issues Steering Committee (RISC), RISC member Patti Metro also called for a re-evaluation, saying the committee is planning to “streamline and fine tune” its activities.

“We are under the impression it’s time to step back and [review the effectiveness] and efficiencies when it comes to RISC,” said Metro, senior grid operations and reliability director of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “Is it time to step back and say, ‘How much value is that exercise [providing? Should we be] continuing to do that type of report?’”

Self-reports accounted for more than three-quarters of noncompliance with NERC rules in 2018. | *NERC*

She noted that NERC’s Reliability Leadership Summit, held March 14, “is very similar to the tech nical conf erence that the FERC does every summer. We hear the same topics, the same conversations, a lot of the same speakers speak in both of those events. And so, our [question] is, should we regroup, and do we have to continue doing that type of event?” (See related story, Changing Grid Calls for New Models, Mindset, Officials Say.)

The RISC will present a report on its plans at the NERC Board of Trustees’ August meeting.

Berardesco said he had one message for members to take back to their companies.

“Security is a lot more important than compliance. We [NERC] can never do anything bad enough to you as would happen if there’s an actual breach in security. … NERC is not your problem. Security is your problem, and I would just urge all of you to think about that in the context of how you interrelate with NERC. The sharing of information, which is so critical to making this system work better, should not be withheld because you’re worried about a compliance risk.”

EEI Security Chief Warns Against Complacency

Scott Aaronson, EEI’s vice president of security and preparedness, also warned against becoming complacent with achieving compliance. “If I put a 10-foot fence around everything … the adversary just brings a 12-foot ladder,” he said. “So, let’s not pretend that standards themselves equate to security.”

“If we’re not preparing for failure, we’re going to fail. That is a sign, I like to believe, of maturity in this sector: That we are willing to talk about — not just all the things we are doing to prevent bad things from happening — but our effectiveness at response and recovery when the bad things come.

“Not if, but when: cyber, physical, storms, acts of war, acts of God. Zombie apocalypse. [We] don’t care why: The power’s out. What are we going to do about it?”

“We have a sense of urgency, both here at EEI and through the [Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council] to do more, do more, do more. Because we know that a war used to be started with a ballistic [missile] being fired downrange. It is far more likely today that a war is going to be started with strokes of a keyboard and attacks on critical infrastructure,” he said. “We know we’re a target.”

Serious critical infrastructure protection violations have dropped since peaking in 2014-16. | *NERC*

Subcommittees to Merge

CCC Chair Jennifer Flandermeyer, of Kansas City Power and Light, said members are moving forward with plans to eliminate the Compliance Processes and Procedures Subcommittee (CPPS) and merge its functions into the ERO Monitoring Subcommittee (EROMS).

“There are a number of reasons for [the merger] but primarily because the workloads tend to complement each other,” Flandermeyer said. “The expertise needed for both of those subcommittees is similar, if not the same, and what CPPS was seeing in their work was feeding the ERO Monitoring Subcommittee, and what EROMS was seeing was actually providing input that was helpful to CPPS. So, there was a natural synergy there.”

EROMS Chair Ted Hobson, of Florida cooperative JEA, will serve as chair until the FRCC seat is dissolved. Lisa Milanes of CAISO will be the vice chair.

“Our expectation is that we would have an approved scope document [for the combined committee] that’s operational before the June [CCC] meeting,” said CPPS Chair Matt Goldberg, of ISO-NE.

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described NRECA’s Patti Metro as the chair of the Reliability Issues Steering Committee (RISC). The RISC chair is Nelson Peeler, chief transmission officer for Duke Energy.]

— Rich Heidorn Jr.

March 18, 2019

Texas Public Utility Commission Briefs: March 13, 2019

The Public Utility Commission of Texas last week formally approved Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative’s request to move 96 MW, or about 12% of its load, and associated transmission facilities from SPP into the ERCOT system. The commission set an integration date of Jan. 1, 2020, during its March 13 open meeting (Docket 48400).

At the same time, the PUC denied Rayburn and Lone Star Transmission’s request to transfer ownership of a 10-mile, 138-kV transmission line and associated rights from Rayburn to Lone Star.

The PUC put off a final decision during its Feb. 7 open meeting. (See “PUC Puts off Final Decision on Rayburn Country,” Texas Public Utility Commission Briefs: Feb. 7, 2019.)

ERCOT’s integration of Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative | *ERCOT*

Rayburn owns and operates 367 miles of transmission lines in Texas, 207 miles of which are in ERCOT. The cooperative will integrate 130 miles of 138-kV lines into ERCOT, with a remaining 30-mile 138-kV circuit staying in SPP.

The co-op late last year reached an unopposed settlement with commission staff, Oncor and Texas Industrial Energy Consumers that approved the transfer. The agreement also denied the Lone Star purchase of the transmission line.

Southwestern Electric Power Co. has served Rayburn’s SPP load through a power supply agreement with the co-op since the 1990s. The contract with SWEPCO will terminate at the end of 2019.

ERCOT has estimated it will cost $31.7 million to integrate Rayburn’s load with the other 88% (approximately 710 MW in 2017) that is already part of the grid operator’s system. Rayburn will make annual hold-harmless payments of $4.5 million for five years to ERCOT wholesale transmission customers through a wholesale transmission service credit rider.

PUC to Intervene in FERC Dockets

Left to right: Texas PUC Commissioners Shelly Botkin, Chair DeAnn Walker and Arthur D’Andrea.

Following an executive session, the commission agreed to intervene in four FERC dockets:

ER19-1 1 24 and ER19-1125, both related to MISO’s Tariff modifications expanding, modifying and clarifying the identification and cost allocation of transmission facilities providing regional and local economic benefits within the RTO’s footprint.

ER19-1156, which adds to MISO’s Tariff a cost allocation methodology for the RTO’s share of certain interregional economic projects with PJM or SPP.

The Louisiana Public Service Commission’s complaint against Entergy and its operating companies that alleges the company’s joint account sales of energy to third-party power marketers and other nonmembers of the Entergy System Agreement from Entergy Arkansas’ Grand Gulf Retained Share violated the agreement (EL19-50).

— Tom Kleckner

March 18, 2019

SPP Seams Steering Committee Briefs: March 13, 2019

SPP staff last week told stakeholders that it will have to make decisions on potential interregional projects in the 2019/20 coordinated system plan (CSP) with MISO without knowing the results of MISO’s final approval process.

Timing differences between the RTOs’ approval processes may result in SPP’s final CSP portfolio including an interregional project that assumes some level of cost sharing with MISO that is not eventually approved, SPP Interregional Coordinator Adam Bell said during the Seams Steering Committee’s Wednesday conference call.

MISO, SPP coordinated system plan calendar | *SPP*

Bell said developing a single final portfolio that is the most optimal and cost-efficient for SPP keeps open potential cost sharing with MISO.

The RTOs’ staff and stakeholders last month recommended conducting a CSP that will study six possible sites for interregional transmission projects. Should the MISO-SPP Joint Planning Committee approve the proposal, the RTOs will begin working on the CSP’s scope. (See MISO, SPP Seek Coordinated Plan in 2019.)

M2M Payments Above $1M 3rd Straight Month

SPP recorded its third straight month of more than $1 million in market-to-market (M2M) payments in January, pushing distributions in its favor to $55.2 million.

January’s market-to-market update | *SPP*

Permanent and temporary flowgates on the SPP-MISO seam were binding for 181 and 310 hours, respectively. That resulted in a $1.5 million distribution from MISO to SPP.

The two RTOs began the M2M process in March 2015. Distributions have flowed in SPP’s direction 22 of the last 28 months.

— Tom Kleckner

March 18, 2019

NERC Survey Highlights Alignment, Transparency Concerns

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — NERC stakeholders continue to complain of inconsistent oversight between regions and want the Electric Reliability Organization to provide faster and more transparent enforcement, according to the results of the biennial ERO Enterprise Effectiveness Survey.

Ted Hobson, chief compliance officer for Florida cooperative JEA, briefed the Compliance and Certification Committee (CCC) on the results at its March 12 meeting at Edison Electric Institute headquarters. (See related story, NERC Compliance and Certification Committee Briefs.) Hobson, who said the results were not statistically different from the prior survey, focused on the “free form” comments by stakeholders.

Hobson said stakeholders were generally positive about NERC’s risk-based Compliance Monitoring Enforcement Program (CMEP) but that some continue to complain of inconsistencies among Regional Entities.

“The approach and implementation of internal control evaluations seems to vary across regions,” said Hobson, the chair of the CCC’s ERO Monitoring Subcommittee (EROMS). “Our observation there was: Some regions are doing it; they’re doing it fairly well and with some detail. And some regions, frankly, weren’t even implementing it.”

The CCC will recommend that NERC continue its collaboration with the committee’s Alignment Working Group to resolve inconsistencies and expand outreach on alignment issues to small registered entities and trade groups. “We’ve had this since … the very first survey [in 2015], this whole issue of consistency,” Hobson said.

Patti Metro, of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, expressed frustration with what she saw as a disconnect between the comments and NERC’s efforts to improve the alignment among REs.

“I don’t know if it’s because they don’t get the message from the people in their own organization that attend those meetings, because we communicate those things,” she said.

Hobson said the responses indicate a lack of awareness of NERC’s Program Alignment Process, an effort begun in 2017, and the Recommendation Tracking tool.

Confidence, Transparency

Hobson said some stakeholders also expressed a lack of confidence in audit teams, particularly those conducting critical infrastructure protection (CIP) reviews.

“Commenters expressed that CIP auditors were providing their interpretations of the standards, and the implication is they seem to vary across regions,” he said. “The picture we get from the comments is that the [operations and procedures] audits generally are well organized; well formatted; pretty consistent. We know what to expect. The CIP audits, not so much. They vary too much across regions, and even in the same region, different audits.”

One recurrent theme was that REs take too long to approve mitigation plans, confirm their completion and issue fines, particularly for low-risk issues.

Another was a desire for more transparency regarding enforcement activities, with respondents complaining that “not enough details are provided to entities to fully understand their violations,” Hobson said.

There is also frustration that third-party tools such as Open Access Technology International (OATI) and MKInsight audit software “are cumbersome and not easily usable for registered entities, especially during an audit or violation mitigation process,” Hobson said. Utilities use OATI’s webPortal to submit data to NERC.

“People think they’re more gauged to being useful to the region than they are the entities,” he added. “I think that’s true, but I think we are addressing that.”

There also were complaints that the Organization Registration and Certification process places a “high administrative burden” on small entities that is disproportionate to the low risk they pose to the bulk power system, Hobson said.

Hobson also discussed the CMEP technology tool project, an effort begun in 2014 to standardize the business processes of NERC and the REs on a single platform.

“People expect a lot from this new tool. So, we really need to work hard to get it right,” he said. “I think we’re doing that but there’s a lot riding on this.”

The first release of the software is set for September, NERC told the CCC. The organization has begun “conference room pilots” to get initial feedback from regional subject matter experts.

‘Positive’ Tone

After Hobson’s briefing, the CCC approved a motion to communicate the survey results to the Enterprise-wide Risk Committee (EWRC).

Hobson acknowledged his briefing focused on the criticisms surfaced in the survey. “If you actually read the whole report in total, you’ll find that it’s got a positive tone to it. We do recognize the improvements and the good changes that have occurred,” he said. “By definition, comments are going to be on the negative side. People that are happy with things simply don’t answer.”

Ken McIntyre, NERC’s director of regulatory programs, said the criticisms were not new. “A lot of it we’re already working on or aware of,” he said. “None of this is a blind spot for us.”

March 18, 2019

NERC CCC Briefs: March 12, 2019

CCC — About 50 utility and RTO officials and NERC staff attended the Compliance and Certification Committee meeting at Edison Electric Institute headquarters in D.C. last week. | © *RTO Insider*

CCC — Charles Berardesco | © *RTO Insider*

Patti Metro, chair of NERC’s Reliability Issues Steering Committee (RISC), also called for a re-evaluation, saying her committee is planning to “streamline and fine tune” its activities.

CCC — Self-reports accounted for more than three-quarters of noncompliance with NERC rules in 2018. | *NERC*

The RISC will present a report on its plans at the NERC Board of Trustees’ August meeting.

Berardesco said he had one message for members to take back to their companies.

EEI Security Chief Warns Against Complacency

“Not if, but when: cyber, physical, storms, acts of war, acts of God. Zombie apocalypse. [We] don’t care why: The power’s out. What are we going to do about it?”

Subcommittees to Merge

EROMS Chair Ted Hobson, of Florida cooperative JEA, will serve as chair until the FRCC seat is dissolved. Lisa Milanes of CAISO will be the vice chair.

“Our expectation is that we would have an approved scope document [for the combined committee] that’s operational before the June [CCC] meeting,” said CPPS Chair Matt Goldberg, of ISO-NE.

– Rich Heidorn Jr.

March 18, 2019

Green ‘Moon Shot’ not Possible, Physicist Tells NERC Forum

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — Physicist Mark P. Mills gave the NERC Reliability Leadership Summit a blistering and entertaining critique of green tech punditry, saying forecasts of a rapid shift away from hydrocarbons are delusional.

Mills, senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, said the big challenge for green technology is the scale of hydrocarbon use — 80% of world energy — and its superior energy density.

“If all of the hydrocarbons that we consume were actually in the form of oil … and we divide them up into barrels, those barrels would go from here in D.C. to [Los Angeles],” he said in a keynote speech. “And the barrels would grow in height at the rate we consume it by one Washington Monument every week. That by itself demonstrates how fatuous it is to talk about ‘moon shots’ to change a system like this. Putting a few people on the moon a few times is an amazing engineering achievement. [But] it’s not a transformation of anything. Transforming and changing how society uses energy is like putting all of humanity on the moon — permanently.”

Mills said those who predict Moore’s Law-scale performance improvements in renewables are making a “category error” in conflating energy technology with digital technology. He cited as an example an International Monetary Fund working paper, “Riding the Energy Transition,” on the potential of electric vehicles to cut oil consumption, which stated “Smartphone substitution seemed no more imminent in the early 2000s than large-scale energy substitution seems today.”

“The biggest energy revolution in terms of how we use energy is unequivocally what we’ve done in computing. Nothing like this has every happened in the history of humanity,” Mills said. “If today’s iPhone had 1980s energy efficiency, that iPhone would be taking the electricity of a Manhattan office building. If a single data center operated at 1980 energy efficiency, one data center would require the entire output of the U.S. on the grid.

“But analogizing information-producing technology with energy-producing technology is a fundamental category error. It’s much worse than comparing apples to oranges. It’s even worse than comparing apples to ball bearings. The difference in the physics between information-producing and energy-producing is deeply profound. If energy systems could scale like computing systems, a single postage-stamp size solar array could power the Empire State Building.”

“That … will … never … happen,” he said, pausing for emphasis with every word. “It happens in comic books. It’s science fiction.”

Mills said the aspirational targets of green tech supporters is based on the notion that wind, solar and battery technologies can make 10-fold gains in efficacy.

“The last few decades, we have seen 10-fold gains in the fundamental efficacy of wind, solar and batteries. But another 10-fold [improvement] is not going to happen. Solar technologies are now approaching underlying physics limits.”

Wind turbines are also closing in on Betz’s law, which states that no turbine can capture more than about 60% of the kinetic energy in wind. “The best wind turbines are now pushing 45% efficiency. … It’s a hell of an achievement,” Mills said. “There’s no 10x left. We’re done.”

Batteries have more headroom for improvements but still face fundamental limits, Mills said.

“There is 1,500% more energy available in a pound of oil than in the best pound of battery chemistry. That’s a big gap. There’s no physics known to close that gap. If you want hydrocarbon class energy density, you would invent oil.

“Now the electrochemistry of batteries is going to get a lot better. There’s a lot of cool stuff on the horizon.”

But the cheapest batteries are currently six times the cost per kilowatt of natural gas generation, Mills said. Even if they reach the “aspirational goal” of two to three times gas-fired generation, batteries won’t be able to replace gas-fired generation on cost.

Mills said there is actually more room for efficiency improvements in shale gas extraction, which he called “under-engineered” despite improvements in horizontal drilling and fracking. Mills has put his money where his mouth is: He is a strategic partner with energy-tech venture fund Cottonwood Venture Partners, whose portfolio consists entirely of companies serving the oil and gas industries.

He did not say whether he still holds to the views of the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct petroleum industry-backed organization that opposed EPA’s regulation of CO2 as a pollutant, insisting it was “one of nature’s most fundamental building blocks.” Mills was among the group’s scientific advisers.

Mills said policymakers concerned about climate change should support funding of basic science that can result in breakthroughs rather looking for incremental improvements to existing technologies. “You didn’t get the car by subsidizing the railroads,” he said.

“The world has spent $2.5 trillion in 20 years on nonhydrocarbon energy forms. And the world has reduced its use of hydrocarbons as a percentage of consumption by 1.5 percentage points. And we use 150% more hydrocarbon than 20 years ago.

“My policy recommendation is … take most of the money that we’re using to subsidize yesterday’s stuff — and I mean wind turbines, yesterday’s batteries — and put half of it back in the Treasury for deficit reduction and the other half give to basic science, because that would be a 10-fold increase for basic research.”

March 18, 2019

Feds Late to Act on Drone Threat, DHS Official Says

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — Former NERC executive Brian Harrell, now assistant director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, last week lamented the federal government’s tardy response to the security threat drones pose to utilities.

While many utilities are using drones in storm response and in monitoring vegetation growth along transmission lines, drones equipped with explosives could threaten utility operations.

“This is not an emerging threat. It was emerging five years ago,” Harrell told attendees of the NERC Reliability Leadership Summit on Thursday. “We’re clearly cognizant of the fact that you do not own the airspace above your generating facilities, the airspace above … your transmission substations. And right now, the laws are such that the federal government isn’t being as helpful as it should be.”

Last July, Yemen’s Houthi movement cla i med it had used a drone to attack a Saudi Aramco refinery in Riyadh. The company acknowledged a fire at the plant but attributed it to “an operational incident.” In August, explosive-carrying drones were used in an attac k during a speech by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Harrell, who formerly served as director of the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) and director of NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Programs, said the federal government has only limited authority over drones but that DHS is preparing a report on security issues posed by the devices.

“I have strongly advocated that whatever recommendations come out of this report must impact, must touch, the private sector,” he said.

A former security director for Duke Energy, Harrell also cautioned utilities on purchasing drones for their own use.

“If you are using foreign-manufactured drones at your facilities, you potentially are incurring risk. So be very, very mindful of that. … Data loss and prevention is [a real threat].”

In 2017, a leaked memo from Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE) alleged that Chinese drone-maker DJI was “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.” DJI, which has been estimated to hold a 70% global market share, responded that the report was based on “clearly false and misleading claims from an unidentified source.”

Harrell said China is “the most active strategic competitor for cyber espionage against the U.S. government, our corporations and our allies. They are stealers of information. Whereas Russia is a … nuisance in one sense, China is actually taking data for their own use.”

March 18, 2019

DOE’s Walker Sees Big Cuts in Storage Costs

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — Assistant Energy Secretary Bruce Walker said Thursday that the Department of Energy is planning a megawatt-scale “Storage Launchpad” that he predicted will cut the cost of energy storage dramatically.

Walker told attendees of the NERC Reliability Summit that funding for the initiative, which will be assigned to one of DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, is included in President Trump’s proposed fiscal 2020 budget, which was released March 11.

“We are going to build a facility … where we can leverage our focus on chemistry. So we’re looking at aqueous, non-aqueous redox equation-type batteries, zinc manganese oxide,” Walker said. “We’ve made some significant breakthroughs already in that space. We believe we’re going to be able to drive the cost down to basically 20% of what it is today over the next five years.”

The budget proposes $5 million for the Storage Launchpad and $15 million “to accelerate the conversion of the National Wind Testing Facility site into an experimental microgrid capable of testing grid integration at the megawatt scale.” The budget would cut funding for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy by 70% and eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Congress rejected similar proposals last year.

Daniel Gabaldon, director and co-founder of Enovation Partners, a Chicago-based consulting firm that does the data analysis for Lazard’s levelized cost of storage report, expressed some skepticism that a $5 million investment could produce such a dramatic return in battery technology but said DOE’s investment would be “a really healthy development.”

Although Enovation doesn’t track the technologies cited by Walker for Lazard, Gabaldon said the prediction of an 80% reduction is in line with claims of early-stage companies pursuing alternatives to lithium-ion technology.

“We’ve seen very dramatic claims, and it would be certainly helpful for the suppliers, as well as potential buyers, to substantiate those claims,” he said in an interview. “Whether it comes to pass, who knows?”

Gabaldon said federal funding is essential for early-stage technologies. The commercial success of lithium-ion batteries for short-duration uses is “sort of shading the forest floor [and denying light to] young shoots of new technologies that — given the right kind of support — could transcend what lithium-ion can do, especially for longer-duration applications, which in the long run will be really essential,” he said.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association, said “securing an 80% cost reduction on precommercial storage technologies could be possible in the next five years.”

“Investing $5 million in this effort, while modest, is welcomed by ESA,” she said in a statement. “Any investment in the energy storage industry translates into direct job growth here in the United States.”

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s 2018 Outlook projects a 66% drop in lithium-ion battery pack prices by 2030, largely because of economies of scale.

Grid Resilience Model as a ‘Platform’

In other remarks, Walker told attendees of the NERC conference that DOE’s effort to develop a North American grid resilience model is progressing and that the department hopes to have a static model complete by October. DOE will then work with NERC, FERC, RTOs, DOE’s power marketing administrations and industry to transition it to a real-time model.

“We will continue [working] on this until such time that we’re able to make the real-time piece work and begin to automate the process with the critical infrastructure we’ve identified,” he said.

Walker said the model will be a “platform” on which DOE can test use of the research and development produced by the department’s National Labs.

One technology, he said, could leapfrog synchrophasors, which were introduced after the 2003 Northeast blackout. With sample rates of about 50 times a second, synchrophasors are too slow for “a system that’s as dynamically changing and integrating renewables and dealing with different levels of harmonics and transients like we’ve never seen in the past, with the threat vectors that we’re seeing,” Walker said.

He said the department is drawing on previously developed fiber optic sensing technologies, which sample about 1 million times a second. “We probably don’t need a million times a second, so what we’re going to try and figure out [is] exactly what we do need to be able to see the harmonics and transients that we’re actually seeing on the grid today.”

Walker also promoted the March 28 technical conference DOE and FERC are hosting “to discuss security practices to protect energy infrastructure.”

In January, Walker announced a $1 million Electricity Industry Technology and Practices Innovation Challenge seeking technologies to address vulnerabilities and threats, and mitigate energy sector interdependencies.

Walker said innovations in energy storage could change how the industry looks at reserve margins. “Reserve margins were put back when the system had fuel security and we anticipated two generators and two major transmission lines dropping off the system,” he said.

“That formula doesn’t work anymore because if I ever take out one of your [natural gas] pipelines, you’re going to lose thousands and thousands of megawatts of generation. And so, you’re automatically going to go into underfrequency load shed.

“We’ve got to do something about it. I know through our organization, which is very much focused on R&D, they look at me a little cross-eyed sometimes when I’m like, ‘We don’t have three years to solve this problem. We’ve got like three months.’”

March 18, 2019

Changing Grid Calls for New Models, Mindset, Officials Say

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — The changing resource mix and growth of distributed generation means planners must adopt new models and new mindsets, speakers said at NERC’s biennial Reliability Leadership Summit on Thursday. The event attracted more than 120 RTO officials, utility executives and regulators at the Mayflower Hotel.

David Ortiz, deputy director of FERC’s Office of Electric Reliability, said the growth of renewable generation and distributed resources requires planners to broaden their focus.

“Our general assumption that we can disaggregate this analysis into bulk [power system-] and distribution-level analyses that interact in well-defined and predictable ways is losing its validity,” he said. “Studies of seasonal peak load and traditional measures of resource adequacy and capacity no longer provide a general representation of the reliability of the electric system.”

‘Natural Experiments’

Ortiz said planners should learn from “the natural experiments that are taking place before us.”

“We can’t randomly assign solar panels to houses and then take a look [at the impact]. They’re just there. But what we can do is pose and assess alternative explanations for observed facts. By doing this in a rigorous way, we can make sure our analysis of the situation is technically sound and is therefore a good basis for decision-making.”

For example, he said, one could hypothesize that the lack of coordination between distributed energy resources and the BPS will cause operators to dispatch plants uneconomically. “We have all the data. We can take a look and determine whether or not that is correct,” he said, posing a second hypothesis. “Or maybe, during times of high distributed energy resource output, transmission constraints will be relieved.

“In the past … it was possible to consider a handful of cases. If we’re going to appropriately and effectively deal with the kind of changes that are coming, it’s going to be necessary to consider not a handful of cases or hundreds, but potentially thousands of different scenarios spanning the complete space of uncertainties in generating resources, access to supporting infrastructure [and] contributions of distributed energy resources.”

The shift will require “prioritizing insight over precision,” Ortiz said, citing the aphorism, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

“Models [can] highlight tradeoffs in system investments and approaches to solving problems such as transmission constraints, need for voltage support, integration of DERs, management of inverter-based resources, [greenhouse gas] and criteria pollutant emissions, and other factors. By doing so, planners can support a robust stakeholder process based on a common understanding of the various tradeoffs and then develop appropriate plans.”

Mark Ahlstrom, vice president of renewable energy policy for NextEra Energy, said the increasing sources of uncertainty may require a shift in system operations.

“We still don’t seem to have the commitment to get into actual probabilistic system operations in terms of … dispatch,” he said. “It keeps coming up. It’s complicated. Its computational. But I think that’s something we have to consider … in the future.”

The Impact of Inverters

Peter Brandien, vice president of system operations for ISO-NE, said planners need a “mindset change” as inverter-based resources grow.

“We used to get a lot of services we naturally took for granted from the rotating mass of the generators. … Now we’re trying to [determine] exactly what those services are and put controllable devices on the system to mimic what we used to get from this rotating mass. … We need a mindset that we’re almost protection control engineers on this big machine…

“We have to understand that this system probably needs to be tuned on a regular basis as the resources change. And I think until we accept that concept, then I fear we’re going to run into problems and we’re always going to be one event behind in addressing the problem.”

NERC CEO Jim Robb expressed similar concerns over the organization’s response to the August 2016 Blue Cut wildfire, when 1,200 MW of solar disconnected from the grid. The October 2017 Canyon 2 fire resulted in the loss of more than 900 MW of solar. (See NERC to Try Again on Inverter Rules.)

“The sad thing about that was it took the Blue Cut fire and gigawatts tripping offline for us to realize that we really do have a problem … when I think every engineer knew that that problem was out there,” he said. “But it took an event to mobilize us to start to deal with it.”

Becoming Proactive

David Morton, chairman of the British Columbia Utilities Commission, said regulators must change their
“capacity” by adding engineering talent and “culture” through a willingness to take more risks. For its part, Canada is beginning to use regional modeling “to understand the potential economic benefits of reinforcing limited interregional interconnections,” he said.

“There’s a wealth of analysis of the many benefits of transmission. However, not all the benefits attributable to transmission are exclusive to the actual route or corridor in which it’s constructed,” he said. “There’s often no one to speak, much less decide, on the merits of a given project on behalf of the entire regional market it will affect. Transmission planning and construction should anticipate development of generation resources and access to lower-cost resources in order to avoid significant economic congestion.”

David Weaver, vice president of transmission strategy and planning for Exelon, sounded a similar theme, referring to offshore wind targets set by state officials in New York, New England and PJM. “With these really aggressive state goals, we need to get more proactive about what transmission investment is needed to be able to reliably deliver those renewable resources.”

Weaver asked whether planners also need to consider the impact of climate change and sea level rise. “Do we need storm-hardening standards?” he asked. “Do we need to build our assets at higher elevations above sea level?”

Spotlight on the West

Many of the changes discussed at the summit are being felt most acutely in the West.

Rich Hydzik, senior transmission operations engineer for Avista, said he’s seen changes he never expected.

“In the 15 years I’ve worked in system operations, I’ve never seen a coal plant [output] go up and down regularly. But I see them do it probably six months of the year now between day and night. And that is a big change,” he said.

He also cited California’s excess daytime solar capacity. “If you’d have told me 10 years ago [that] we’d see big time power flow out of California almost year-round during certain hours of the day, I would never have believed it.”

Mark Rothleder, vice president of market quality and renewable integration for CAISO, said that scheduling day-ahead resources on an hourly basis is no longer sufficient because of how much solar output can change within an hour.

“We’re looking at going to a 15-minute granularity … in the day-ahead time frame. We already do it in the real-time [market], but we’re finding it’s increasingly necessary to do that in the day-ahead. We’ve got 7,000 MW of behind-the-meter solar; 12,000 MW on the grid side. So, we see those evening and morning ramps as a significant challenge.”

Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner Matthew Schuerger said the growth of distribution-level solar means his state needs to incorporate distribution planning into its integrated resource planning, “where they haven’t traditionally been.”

Planners also are having to look differently at how they procure reliability services. “When you planned for capacity, you got everything else: energy, voltage support, frequency response and ramping flexibility,” Schuerger said. “We’re moving out of that world.”

One thing that won’t be changing, said Thad LeVar, chairman of the Public Service Commission of Utah, is the IRP process itself.

LeVar said the proposed addition of a day-ahead market in the Western Energy Imbalance Market has “real potential.”

But he said his state won’t be signing up if it means the end of IRPs.

“I think I’m safe in predicting that Western states like Utah are not — at least in the near future — going to express an interest in joining an RTO that has authority over resource adequacy and system planning,” he said. “The IRP model is going to continue to be a bedrock principal in the Western U.S. in the near term.”

March 17, 2019

MISO Going Back to the Futures for MTEP 20

By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO says it will rely on the same set of futures for the third straight year when it evaluates transmission projects in its 2020 Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 20) — but some stakeholders are eager for a rewrite of the scenarios.

The RTO announced the decision at a Thursday workshop on MTEP 20 futures development after proposing last month to recycle the futures with limited demand, capital cost, fuel price, retirement and renewable data revisions. But some members have argued that MISO’s limited fleet change future is no longer a likely scenario, and others have asked for more integration of the RTO’s ongoing, multiyear renewable generation study. (See “MISO Proposes Virtually Unchanged MTEP 2020 Futures,” MISO Planning Week Briefs: Feb. 12-13, 2019.)

MISO in 2017 created four future scenarios for use in MTEP planning, including:

limited fleet change, in which the fleet remains relatively static with coal units retiring at the end of their useful life;
continued fleet change, in which the grid develops according to the trends of the past decade;
accelerated fleet change, driven by a strong economy that increases demand and motivates carbon regulations and increased renewable use; and
a future in which distributed and emerging technologies become more widely used.

Veriquest Group’s David Harlan questioned whether the scenarios still capture the “bookends” of possibilities in the future. He pointed out that MISO could approve a major transmission project that looks useful under all four futures but proves not to be as beneficial as expected.

“There is a fairly large appetite to think about updating futures for the next cycle,” Harlan said. He also asked for MISO to provide more transparency into how it assembles futures assumptions.

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Sam Gomberg said the futures “continue to underestimate the pace of renewable generation deployment across the region.”

In written comments submitted to MISO, the UCS said, “In particular, the limited fleet change future presents an unreasonably low assumption. … While we agree with MISO’s assertion that there have been no significant changes to state or federal policies to warrant new futures narratives, other significant drivers of renewable deployment have emerged in recent years and continue to accelerate renewable energy penetration levels.”

But NextEra Energy said, “Extensive updates to the base data are warranted.”

“The most significant economic changes have been cost reductions and technological improvements for wind, solar and battery storage generation. This has fundamentally changed the long-term value proposition of these technologies,” NextEra said. The company also pointed to 10 MISO utilities that have significant renewable or carbon reduction goals.

On the other hand, DTE Energy and American Transmission Co. said MISO’s plan to merely refresh its futures’ base data for MTEP 20 was appropriate. WPPI Energy said didn’t see an urgent need to revamp the futures for MTEP 20, but it asked MISO to plan an extensive retooling for 2021.

Consultant Roberto Paliza questioned whether MISO was properly considering recent climate change studies, electric vehicle expansion, corporate promises to get energy sourced from renewables and several utilities’ decarbonization commitments in the next decades.

There’s a “new potential reality,” he said. “I’m concerned that major transmission expansion will be made without focus on future possibilities that are not covered by these futures.”

“Today that hasn’t been hard-baked into the futures, but it’s an important conversation to have,” agreed MISO Planning Manager Tony Hunziker.

Hunziker said that even though MISO’s goal is to reuse the MTEP 19 futures for 2020, the RTO could incorporate some minor changes if “there’s critical mass on agreement” and it has the manpower, technical capability and time to make them.

But Minnesota Public Utilities Commission staff member Hwikwom Ham said the main uncertainty is load growth, more so than retirements and renewable penetration.

MISO will hold another workshop on the subject next month and expects to finalize MTEP 20 futures sometime in June.