By Rich Heidorn Jr.
WASHINGTON — Risk-averse engineers and outdated utility ratemaking structures are preventing quicker deployment of innovative technologies that could avoid transmission line rebuilds and save money, speakers told the Infocast Transmission Summit last week.
The discussion came in a session on how technologies such as dynamic line ratings, phasor measurement units and HVDC can increase the capacity of existing rights of way.
Jack McCall, vice president of sales for Lindsey Manufacturing, likened DLRs and PMUs to technologies that can increase vehicle speeds on a curvy highway: PMUs are like Ferraris, which can take curves at high speeds; DLR, he said, is like straightening the road.
Gregg Rotenberg, president of Smart Wires, quoted former Southern Co. CEO David Ratcliffe, who said there are three types of transmission organizations: ostriches, who choose to ignore change; deer, who are frozen in place by change; and lions, who will seek to capitalize on the change and “are going to eat a bunch of ostrich and deer.”
Ali Amirali, senior vice president of private equity fund Starwood Energy Group Global, offered a fourth type: cats, who are indifferent to change. He cited the Bonneville Power Administration, which he said views its mission as delivering hydropower to preferred customers and does not seek to maximize the capacity of the system because it’s not part of the agency’s “mandate.”
“And they curtail wind all the time,” interjected Hudson Gilmer, vice president of commercial markets for Genscape.
DLRs, which can measure conductor temperature, sag and line capacity, as well as detect icing and “galloping” — high-amplitude, low-frequency oscillation caused by wind — have been available for more than a decade, but early applications required scheduling an outage and deployment of bucket trucks and crews. “And once it was on a line, congestion is almost like whack-a-mole; it moves around on your network,” Gilmer said. “And then it’s very hard to get [operations and maintenance] dollars to move it to a new place.”
“If you look back over the last 10 to 20 years, there have been so many studies done both in North America and elsewhere in the world that show that dynamic line rating truly does expose easily 10% to 25% additional capacity on any transmission line almost on a regular basis,” added McCall. “It’s a very low-hanging fruit.”
Newer DLR technologies, such as those sold by Genscape and Lindsey, are easier to install but still face institutional inertia.
“Why do we not have real-time monitoring? … It’s not the technology. It is the policies. It is the standards. It is the personnel and it’s the decision making,” Amirali said.
“The people who are running the grid — me included, [a] former operator — are about the most conservative people on Earth,” he continued. “We are trained to be conservative. Because [if] an engineer takes a risk and he’s successful, nobody really knows about it [because] the system operates the way it was supposed to. We take a risk and we fail: Chernobyl!”
The resistance to change also is a function of utilities’ organizational structures and revenue models, speakers said.
“Risk doesn’t stop us from doing deals,” Rotenberg said. “The bigger challenge is those transmission organizations who choose to look at all the risk in front of them in terms of how fast the world is changing, how fast generation and load are changing and say, ‘No I’m just going to keep building the lines and reconductoring every line possible because I think my ratepayers will keep paying it.”
“What a utility gets rewarded on is deploying capital,” agreed Amirali. “Why build one line when you can build two?”
Rotenberg said his company has proposed a $30 million deployment of its technology for a western utility as an alternative to a $175 million reconductoring.
“Every regulator who’s heard about this project is saying, ‘How can I make sure my utility does it?’
“Eight of 10 [utility] CEOs … do understand [the value of cheaper non-transmission alternatives]. Only six out of 10 vice presidents of transmission understand that,” Rotenberg said. The transmission vice presidents’ view, he said, is that congestion is “not my cost.”
McCall said FERC should offer DLR compensation based on the difference in LMPs with and without constraints the devices relieve, similar to the way it designed the compensation scheme for demand response in Order 745.
Amirali said the commission also should reconsider its 2010 Western Grid Development ruling (EL10-19), which approved use of storage to defer a transmission upgrade but said such resources could not be used for any other purpose if they are receiving a rate of return. He said the ruling discouraged more widespread use of storage.
“You’re buying a Cadillac for one day a year,” he said. “It’s a wasted use of an extraordinarily dynamic asset.”
In a separate session, Philippe Bouchard, vice president of business development for Eos Energy Storage, praised Maine regulators for requiring utilities to evaluate untraditional transmission alternatives.
“It’s not a requirement that they go purchase energy storage or demand response or anything else. It’s just integrating that viewpoint into the methodology of looking at all available resources to meet their needs,” he said. “And there’s some really great opportunities, 15 or 20 miles of transmission lines that are stretching into the pockets of Maine that are ripe for [transmission and distribution] deferral.”
Jeffrey Hein, senior manager of regional transmission policy for Xcel Energy, said planning regions across the country have included non-transmission alternatives in their procedures. “This may now begin to introduce some competition, to …. pit technology against technology, old, new, what’s best to place where.”
Rotenberg said “one or two big wins” are all that’s required to change the mindset.
“Once we have one or two projects that everyone was certain were going to be a new line or rebuild and turn it into a non-wires alternative, everyone’s eyes will open up,” he said. “The hurdle [for building new lines or upgrades] is going to become much higher. The certainty … that that upgrade is required for a very long time is just going to keep going up and up.”
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