By Suzanne Herel
CAMBRIDGE, Md. — Three experts examined the challenges of integrating distributed energy resources into electricity markets at the general session of PJM’s Annual Meeting last week.
Richard Tabors, co-director of the Utility of the Future Study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisioned a platform market structure akin to the sharing economy of services such as Uber and Airbnb.
Such a construct, enabling multiple participants to buy and sell energy from each other, requires accurately valuing generation and demand response resources — including real energy, reactive power and reserves, he said.
“How far and how deeply can I take that pricing question? I can take the arithmetic all the way to the meter,” he said.
Tabors called the method distributed locational marginal price (DLMP). Tabors called the method distributed locational marginal price (DLMP). “There’s a huge number of hours when there’s a material difference between the nodal transmission prices and the nodal prices occurring on the attached distribution feeder,” he said.
It is a model that Tabors’ consulting firm presented for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority under the state’s Reforming the Energy Vision initiative. (See related story, NY REV Order Revamps Utility Business Model.)
Gridwise Alliance CEO Steve Hauser focused on the challenge of encouraging technology while furthering the public good in developing the grid of the future.
The industry is moving from being utility-centric to customer-focused, he said, sparking an evolving business model to accommodate two-way power flow. The model must be adaptable and allow customers to provide services back to the grid, he said.
He noted that D.C. and PJM states Illinois, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania ranked in the top 10 in the alliance’s annual Grid Modernization Index.
Like Tabors, Hauser said the industry must properly value, integrate and optimize DER — and provide better information to decision-makers.
Will Agate, senior vice president of energy operations and initiatives at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, outlined how the former military base has become a “Smart Energy Campus” with its own microgrid. Agate said the yard is one of the most successful Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) projects in the U.S., with industrial and office tenants including the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard, a Tastykake bakery, Urban Outfitters and GlaxoSmithKline.
The Navy Yard invested $33 million in grid modernization to create what Agate called “one of the largest nonmilitary, unregulated electric systems on the East Coast.”
As part of its energy master plan, the Navy Yard is reducing demand while adding supply independence.
In addition to its 10-MW substation with a PECO Energy tie-in, the Navy Yard has on-site generation: a 6-MW natural gas peak shaver and 1 MW of solar generation.
Although the Navy Yard project is somewhat unique, Agate said it can provide “lessons learned” for other communities considering microgrid and smart grid solutions. Agate said it is important to bring stakeholders together to agree on a master plan and to not be afraid of getting something started.
Separately, the company also asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York for a declaration that federal law trumps state “permitting jurisdiction over certain other environmental matters” (1:16-cv-00568).
The current grid was based on utilities earning returns on investments in large, centralized power systems sized to meet peak electric demand that occurs only a few days each year, “an energy and financially inefficient system,” the commission said in announcing the order.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is calling for better fire prevention, more stringent anti-terrorist protections and better disaster preparedness at the nation’s sites for storing spent nuclear fuel.
A 22-year-old hose linking a storage tank to a pump leading to an emergency generator failed during an inspection earlier this year at Exelon’s aging Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey, leading the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to assess the plant with a “white” finding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the operator of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan have reached a settlement concerning a leak that allowed 80 gallons of radioactive water to escape into Lake Michigan in 2011. Instead of a fine, the commission said it is satisfied with Entergy’s decision to take corrective actions to ensure a leak does not happen again.
Eastern Shore Natural Gas has filed with FERC to expand its natural gas transmission system, including the installation of 33 miles of looping pipeline in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.
EPA issued a draft water use permit for Entergy’s Pilgrim nuclear generating station, updating a permit that was first issued in 1991. Although opponents of the plant have long argued that the water use permit expired in 1996, the agency said regulations allow the plant to use the original permit until a new one is issued.
The commission said its May 19 letter order resolves all seams issues raised by MDU stemming from the Integrated System members — the Western Area Power Administration-Upper Great Plains Region (Western-UGP), Basin Electric Power Cooperative and Heartland Consumers Power District — becoming transmission-owning members of SPP last October (
“I regret we’re at this point,” Patton told board members. “We’re talking about carving out Zone 4,” referring to his concerns that a proposed forward procurement plan for retail-choice areas will isolate the Illinois region.
