MISO and PJM halved their shortlist of potential smaller interregional transmission projects down to two but warned that even those project benefits might be too small to proceed.
The RTOs staffs presented the two contenders Monday during MISO-PJM Interregional Planning Stakeholder Advisory Committee (IPSAC). The potential targeted market efficiency projects (TMEPs) are line work on the Powerton-Towerline 138-kV flowgate in central Illinois and a potential fix for the congested Chicago-Praxair 138-kV flowgate near the Chicago area. (See MISO, PJM Consider 4 Small Interregional Projects.)
The grid operators studied 23 flowgates accounting for $328 million of congestion costs during 2020-21 in this year’s TMEP process.
PJM’s Nick Dumitriu said analysis is still underway and said the two remaining projects won’t necessarily be eliminated. He said the RTOs are still comparing anticipated project costs against the first four years of estimated project benefits.
“It’s premature to say there won’t be a TMEP,” he said, predicting that “at least” one project could still be recommended to the RTOs’ respective boards of directors by the end of the year.
Stakeholders have asked the grid operators to consider raising the $20 million TMEP cost threshold given continued inflation and supply chain issues.
TMEP projects must cost less than $20 million, completely cover installed capital cost within four years of service, and be in service by the third summer peak after their approval. The projects are assessed using a shorter time horizon than interregional market efficiency projects.
This summer, WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante asked the grid operators to consider creating a joint targeted interconnection queue study similar to that undertaken by MISO and SPP. That work has resulted in identifying about $1 billion of projects on their seams. (See MISO, SPP Propose 90-10 Cost Split for JTIQ Projects.)
“We are very encouraged by the progress with SPP and would like to see a similar initiative with PJM,” Plante said.
SPP has added its first international member in Saskatchewan Power Corporation (SaskPower), seven years after the RTO’s first international transactions with the Canadian utility.
The two organizations said SaskPower’s membership represents their continued efforts to increase reliability through interregional coordination. In August, they announced a 20-year interconnection agreement to expand transmission capacity between Saskatchewan and the U.S. The announcement requires construction of a new line, which will allow for 650 MW of cross-border flows beginning in 2027. (See “RTO, SaskPower Agree to Expand Interconnection’s Capacity,” SPP Briefs: Week of Aug. 8, 2022.)
“SPP is very pleased to welcome SaskPower into our organization The continued success of our organization and the integrity of the bulk power system both rely on strong interregional ties,” SPP CEO Barbara Sugg said in a press release.
SaskPower’s membership became effective Oct. 1. They are now SPP’s 115th member.
“Greater integration with the SPP will help to ensure reliable, clean energy is available to Saskatchewan to support our own generating facilities,” SaskPower CEO Rupen Pandya said in a press release.
SPP and SaskPower have operated as adjacent entities since October 2015, when SPP’s service territory expanded to the North Dakota-Saskatchewan border after the Integrated System’s utilities became members of SPP and placed their facilities under the RTO’s tariff. The organizations have a joint operating agreement that outlines how the organizations coordinate reliability and transmission functions.
The utility and SPP will expand the 150-MW tie line that connects them. SPP has been making international transactions with SaskPower since an emergency situation in late 2015, thanks to Canadian interconnections that came when the Integrated System joined the RTO. (See SPP, SaskPower Make First International Trade.)
Climate activists who cheered the failure of Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to ease the permitting of energy infrastructure projects are ignoring how the current rules are hobbling the expansion of renewable power, FERC Chairman Richard Glick said last week.
Glick told Raab Associates’ New England Electric Restructuring Roundtable in Boston Sept. 30 that he was meeting with a group of environmental justice advocates earlier in the week when it was announced that Manchin had pulled the bill from the Senate floor.
“They were all celebrating,” Glick said. “And I said to them, ‘You know, you can have differences of opinion about different provisions in the bill. But if your goal is to get more renewable energy on the grid, you’ve got to get more transmission built. … I think just to pretend that the status quo is working [is a mistake]. It’s not working.”
Manchin (D-W.V.) withdrew the permitting proposal from inclusion in a must-pass spending bill when it became clear he lacked the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate — with substantial opposition among his fellow Democrats who saw it as a concession to the oil and gas industry that would undermine decarbonization efforts. Manchin vowed to continue seeking votes for the bill.
Glick said the federal government’s role in siting will likely increase as a result of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allows utilities to ask FERC to overrule state regulators’ rejection of a project.
The Manchin proposal would allow FERC to order construction of transmission designated as in the national interest if asked by a state or utility. It would also set a two-year target for the completion of environmental reviews and reduce the time community members have to file legal challenges. (See Manchin Details Proposal to Streamline Approval of Energy Projects.)
As he had earlier in regard to the siting authority in the IIJA, Glick continued to express skepticism that FERC will play a major role in settling siting disputes. (See Glick Aiming for Final Transmission Rule by End of Year.)
“Even if the federal government is given the authority that Sen. Manchin has proposed — FERC in particular — the states are going to continue to play [a major role], whether that be through siting other transmission lines or general ratemaking authority. Utilities aren’t going to want to cross their states very often. And so I think the states are going to continue to play a very important role no matter what happens with the Manchin bill.”
Matthew Nelson, chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, who spoke with Glick in the first discussion of the Roundtable, said he welcomed a stronger federal role in transmission siting.
“I don’t think we’re going to get to our decarbonization goals without a big step forward that allows a big, well-researched project to be built. So I think having something like this — having a backstop authority — is going to be very, very important.”
State Role in Cost Allocation
Nelson also expressed support for FERC’s proposed requirement in its April Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) that transmission providers seek the agreement of relevant state entities on cost allocation, with FERC imposing a solution if no agreement is reached (RM21-17). (See FERC Issues 1st Proposal out of Transmission Proceeding.)
“I do think that FERC kind of being the referee in the room will allow the conversations not to be, ‘It is either build this or not build this,’ but, ‘This is getting built, and what is the proper way to allocate the costs?’ I think that’s a much more productive conversation,” Nelson said. “… So I think that structure has a very good chance of being successful if properly implemented.”
Abe Silverman, general counsel for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, said FERC could help force agreements to share costs.
“We almost need the Sword of Damocles from FERC hanging over everyone’s head,” he said during the Roundtable’s second discussion. “We almost need that strong, proactive FERC, standing out there saying, ‘If you do not agree to a cost allocation, then we are going to impose one on you.’”
“I think it’s an eminently reasonable idea,” said Nelson. “I think the more that we’ve looked at the way the grid is evolving, the more we need redundancy and reserves for multiple different reasons.”
Nelson said there are many technical questions regarding how to set such minimums. “But I really think it’s a solid idea … that could bring benefits to a lot of different regions when they don’t know they need it.”
Glick said there was “an enormous consensus” following the Texas outages during Winter Storm Uri that transfer capacity needed to be increased. But he said many issues are standing in the way, “not the least of which is who builds it and who pays for it.”
Future NOPR on Socializing Interconnection Costs?
Raab also noted that the task force discussed ways to change participant funding rules to socialize some interconnection costs, a proposal that was not included in the interconnection NOPR issued in June (RM22-14).
“It’s an issue that I feel very strongly about,” Glick responded. “We still have a lot of future NOPRs to come. So hopefully, we will address it.”
Glick said the current process does not allocate costs roughly commensurate with benefits, as required by court precedents.
“In many cases, you know, you have a bunch of wind generators coming in [and the] first one that comes online has to pay the cost of the network upgrade. Everyone else behind them doesn’t have to pay. That doesn’t seem fair, right?” Glick asked. “Secondly, there are a number of benefits that these upgrades provide, in addition to just allowing the generator or generators to hook up to the grid. And we’re not taking that into account.
“At the Task Force, not everyone was on the same page,” Glick said. “I think we have more work to do on it — maybe develop more of a record on it. But I’m very supportive. And I’m determined to address this issue.”
Nelson also expressed support for a change. “Having one person take the hit for everyone behind it worked in the day when there was one huge generator coming online, and maybe that required an upgrade. But I’m not sure that with a distributed generation market, that makes much sense,” he said.
Offshore Wind Transmission
Glick also said the commission is considering whether tariff changes are needed to allow PJM, NYISO or ISO-NE to develop offshore wind “collector” systems to minimize transmission costs and beach landings. “It would be foolish not to include those [state OSW] goals and mandates in our transmission planning processes,” he said.
New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities (BPU) on Thursday outlined a proposal to stimulate the development of standalone storage capacity by offering incentives for grid-scale and consumer-level projects, as the state struggles to reach its goal of putting 2,000 MW of storage in place by 2030.
About 30% of the incentives available under the Storage Incentive Program (SIP) would be paid to storage projects as fixed annual incentives to both utility-scale and distributed projects, with a set value per kilowatt-hour of capacity. The remainder of the SIP incentives would be paid through a “pay for performance” mechanism and tied to the environmental benefits.
The proposal sets a target of building 1,000 MW of four-hour-plus storage by 2030. The BPU is seeking a steady increase in the annual capacity of storage installed each year, with 40 MW of four-hour storage installed in 2023, rising to 330 MW in 2029.
“Storage is expected to play a key role in maintaining electric system reliability as carbon-intensive resources are displaced by more intermittent renewable generation,” according to the proposal. “Energy storage has the potential to simultaneously improve grid reliability, enable more extensive grid decarbonization through expanded hosting capacity, improve community resilience and reduce electricity costs for all consumers.”
Missed Targets
Storage is widely seen as a paramount element needed to manage electricity supply as intermittent renewables become increasingly dominant without relying on fossil-fired peakers.
Yet even as the state has moved aggressively to develop wind, solar and other clean energy initiatives, it has made little progress in developing storage capacity. The state Energy Master Plan recognized storage as a key element and said the state would need 9 GW of capacity. The state Clean Energy Act, enacted in 2018, said that the BPU should create a process for putting 600 MW of storage in place by 2021 and 2,000 MW in place by 2030.
But the state missed the 2021 goal, and it currently has only 497 MW in place at present, little of which is new technology. The BPU has acknowledged in the past that about 420 MW is contributed by the Yards Creek Pumped Storage Facility in Blairstown, a pumped storage facility developed in 1965. The remainder is mainly lithium-ion batteries. (See NJ Lagging in Energy Storage Progress.)
“Multiple other states are already rapidly deploying large quantities of energy storage capacity,” the proposal states. “And some are even finding energy storage already has the ability to reduce costs to electricity consumers in addition to helping advance the clean energy transition. Yet, despite the demonstrated benefits of energy storage and New Jersey clean energy leadership, the state is currently lagging when it comes to energy storage deployment.”
The proposal adds that “multiple benefit-cost analyses commissioned by other states indicate that energy storage deployment can reduce consumers’ net electricity costs, with total ratepayer benefits more than covering the ratepayer costs of storage incentives.”
Creating Consumer Benefits
The SIP represents the BPU’s effort to help remedy the state’s storage shortfall. So does another BPU proposal under the Competitive Solar Incentive (CSI) program, the final rules for which are expected to be released this year. The CSI, which provides incentives for grid-scale solar projects, will offer incentives for co-located storage.
The SIP proposal said the BPU has shaped the program to look for incentive levels that are big enough to lure finance for successful storage projects while “minimizing the period over which ratepayers will support each energy storage resources.”
One difficulty, the proposal says, is that energy storage developers “generally can only monetize a fraction of the benefits they produce.” Although energy storage brings great benefits in “optimizing the regional power system,” it has proven difficult to make money from that, the report says.
The BPU will solicit public and stakeholder input on the plan in three hearings, on Oct. 21, Nov. 4 and Nov. 14.
The proposal says it is seeking to encourage private ownership of storage so that the commercial and operational risks are borne by investors, with support from ratepayers, and to create a competitive market. That will require “a robust effort by the EDCs [electric distribution companies] to ensure that the grid is capable of connecting storage devices at the distribution and transmission levels,” according to the proposal, which does not allow for utility ownership or operation of storage devices.
The proposal also expects energy storage owners to engage in “value stacking,” or lining up “various sources of customer savings/benefits and grid revenues,” to make the project lucrative and attractive to customers. The anticipated revenue streams include:
wholesale market revenues;
energy arbitrage in time-of-use differentiated markets;
participation in wholesale ancillary services markets;
retail bill reductions created by active management, such as management of demand charges, standby charges and distribution costs; and
cost-effective investment in distributed energy resources, electric vehicle charging or other technologies supported by energy storage devices.
The two-pronged incentive structure is designed to make projects as attractive as possible to investors. The proposal suggests a “declining block” structure in which the BPU sets the incentive levels so that they decrease as capacity in the state rises, which will give investors a “clear trajectory” of the incentive levels for several years.
The first incentives should be 10 annual payments of $20/kWh of storage capacity for the grid supply program and $40/kWh of storage capacity for the distributed program, according to the proposal. To get the incentive, however, the storage device would have to be online 95% of all hours.
The performance-based incentives are designed to “maximize environmental benefits” while also supporting the grid during times of “operational stress.” Aside from ensuring that the devices help reduce emissions, that strategy also will “incent storage developers to site their units in the places on the grid where they will provide the most significant price and environmental benefits to consumers,” according to the proposal.
It suggests the BPU hire a “program administrator” to track and administer the incentives, which will be based in part on marginal carbon emissions data from PJM. That would enable the program to reward grid-supply storage sources that result in lower marginal carbon emission while reducing incentives for storage that do not, the proposal states.
The proposal does not suggest specific incentive rates, which will be determined in discussions with stakeholders.
For distributed storage devices, the proposal suggests that EDCs consider an incentive that would pay based on the operation of the device during hours identified as high demand, such as summer afternoon hours. The EDC will have to show how the payment structure maximizes environmental benefits, minimizes distribution investment, “minimize[s] the stress on the local distribution system and reduce[s] operating costs,” the proposal says.
New Jersey officials hope to engage in “horse trading” with other PJM states over the cost allocation of transmission needed to meet their climate goals, a key state regulator said last week.
Abe Silverman, New Jersey Board of Public Utilities | Raab Associates
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has estimated costs would be $5 billion to $34 billion in a “piecemeal” approach, BPU General Counsel Abe Silverman said during the second panel of Raab Associates’ New England Electric Restructuring Roundtable in Boston on Friday.
“The other clean energy states and PJM are looking at billions of dollars of transmission upgrades if we do it the way we’re doing it now, when we can meet all the needs of the entire PJM region at approximately the same price,” he said. “So there’s a lot of room for horse trading, if we can get the parties to the table.”
Silverman said the BPU will announce later this month whether it will select any of the 80 proposed transmission projects PJM received in response to its solicitation for 7,500 MW of offshore wind transmission. The solicitation was conducted under PJM’s State Agreement Approach (SAA), which makes New Jersey responsible for all of the costs.
The SAA leaves New Jersey “almost in a hostage situation at the moment,” Silverman said. “The transmission projects that we are planning benefit many states in PJM; they will see lower production costs as a result of these upgrades. But because of the way the system works, we are solely responsible for the cost. That needs to change.”
MISO Planning Efforts Win Praise
Silverman said the SAA shouldn’t be the only option for states such as New Jersey. “And this is where I think we really need the ISOs to step up and do the kind of long-term proactive planning that MISO, frankly, has been doing now for a decade.
“I’m just in awe of what MISO has done over the past couple of years,” he added, saying the RTO is “probably five to 10 years ahead of the rest of us.”
Following more than two years of planning, MISO identified 18 transmission projects that could add 50 to 60 GW of new resources in the MISO Midwest subregion at a cost of $10.3 billion. The RTO says benefits from its Long-Range Transmission Planning Tranche 1 will be shared among all Midwest subregions and produce a benefit-cost ratio of at least 2.1:1 for all zones.
Overlapping the Tranche 1 study was MISO and SPP’s Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue (JTIQ) study, which resulted in five seams projects that will enable 30 GW of new generation.
Aubrey Johnson, MISO | Raab Associates
“The LRTP deals with deliverability; the JTIQ deals with injectability,” said Aubrey Johnson, MISO’s vice president of system planning, who appeared at the Roundtable via video.
“One of the things that we talk a lot about is we’re not trying to maximize the transmission; we’re trying to maximize the value of the transmission that we propose,” Johnson said. He said MISO is “extremely conservative” in identifying benefits. In “our state of North Dakota, it’s against state law to consider decarbonization [benefits]. … The No. 1 thing that [the projects solve] is congestion.”
But Johnson said the broad benefits have not eliminated “friction” over cost allocation. “Cost allocation is a full-contact sport,” he said, adding that he has created a team to help identify improvements in its cost allocation methodology.
NYISO’s New Transmission
Doreen Harris, NYSERDA | Raab Associates
Also speaking at the Roundtable was Doreen Harris, CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and co-chair of the state Climate Action Council. Harris discussed the state’s Power Grid Study, which identified distribution and transmission upgrades needed to achieve the state’s climate goals, including meeting 70% of the state’s electric energy demand with renewable sources by 2030.
Achieving its goals will change the state’s grid from peaking in the summer to in the winter by the mid-2030s, Harris said, with peak demand doubling to about 45 GW.
To reduce New York City’s reliance on fossil fuels, NYSERDA is procuring 2,550 MW of new HVDC transmission capacity through the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 1,250-MW line spanning 339 miles from Quebec and Clean Path NY, a 1,300-MW transmission line that will run 175 miles from Delaware County. Both lines will terminate in Queens.
NYSERDA is procuring 2,550 MW of new HVDC transmission capacity through the Champlain Hudson Power Express and Clean Path NY. | NYSERDA
“It is not simple to move these projects forward by any stretch,” said Harris. “What we are procuring is actually quite unique. So we’re procuring, in this instance, renewable energy attributes delivered to Zone J [New York City]. And so that was what the RFP was looking for. It was not saying, ‘Here’s the [transmission] project to bring forward.’ It was saying, ‘Here’s the problem; solve the problem.’”
ISO-NE Sees Widespread Tx Overloads
Robert Ethier, ISO-NE | Raab Associates
ISO-NE also expects its electric demand to switch to a winter peak by 2035, said Robert Ethier, vice president of system planning for the RTO.
By 2031, ISO-NE forecasts the region will have 1.1 million air-source heat pumps and 1.5 million electric vehicles. By 2050, the RTO says its modeling shows there would be overloads on 50% of its transmission lines without major upgrades to the system.
“So if you build all the things that are required to meet the state goals, and you run everything off electricity in 2050, what does the transmission system look like?” he asked. “The short answer is, a lot more expensive, which is not really a surprise. So the real question is, where does that money get spent?”
Ethier said it was “humbling” to hear the other grid operators discuss their challenges.
“There’s just so much going on in this space,” he said. “I feel good about what New England is doing. I think we’re doing a lot; I think we as a region are moving forward. But boy, you listen to these other regions, you realize every region is kind of in the same boat.”
Obstacles to State Goals
During the question-and-answer period, Fran Cummings of Peregrine Energy Group asked whether grid planners had contingency plans in case worsening climate impacts forces changes now expected in 2050 to be accelerated to 2040.
“The holdup is not going to be the planning, it’s going to be the building,” responded Ethier. “What we’re seeing now is siting is a problem; permitting is a problem; and the supply chain is a problem. We have large wind farms that are delaying their in-service date because of supply chain issues. And we see a lot of that going on in the queue as well: People want to slow down their interconnection process, because it’s ahead of where their project really is.”
Johnson said MISO planners have discovered that resource changes originally expected by 2040 are likely to occur by 2030.
“Procuring a 345-kV transformer is not trivial. Movement of them in the United States is not trivial. The people actually needed to do the work is not trivial. So my concern is that if you try to force an acceleration of all the work that is being considered, the cost of those is going to increase,” he said.
The Texas Reliability Entity knocked another registered entity for violating NERC’s facility ratings standards last month, assessing a $105,000 penalty in a settlement with the Buffalo Gap Wind Farm (NP22-30).
FERC said Friday it would not further review the settlement, leaving the penalty intact.
NERC submitted the settlement to the commission in its monthly spreadsheet Notice of Penalty (NOP) on Aug. 31, the same day it submitted a separate NOP and spreadsheet NOP concerning violations of the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards. Details of the utilities and regional entities involved in these violations were not disclosed, in accordance with NERC and FERC’s policy treating CIP infringements as critical energy/electric infrastructure information. (See FERC, NERC to End CIP Violation Disclosures.)
Buffalo Gap Wind Farm — located about 20 miles southwest of Abilene, Texas — was built in three phases between 2006 and 2008 and has a total capacity of 520 MW. During a compliance audit in 2020, Texas RE determined that the facility was in violation of reliability standard FAC-009-1 (Establish and communicate facility ratings) and its successor FAC-008-3 (Facility ratings). FAC-009-1 was in effect from 2009 to 2013, when it was replaced by FAC-008-3; FAC-008-3 was replaced by FAC-008-5 last year. (See “Standards Actions,” NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Feb. 4, 2021.)
Requirement R1 of the original standard, and R6 of the second, requires transmission and generator owners to establish facility ratings that are “consistent with the associated facility ratings methodology [FRM].” However, Texas RE found that Buffalo Gap’s one-line diagram included elements that were not included in its FRM.
When confronted, the utility at first said that these elements were owned by another transmission owner, but the interconnection agreement confirmed that it was owned by Buffalo Gap. When the entity recalculated the FRM, it found that one of the elements, a switch, was the most limiting element in the facility. The miscalculation had been in effect ever since the utility made the original FRM in 2009 and ended when the facility ratings documents were updated on Aug. 26, 2021.
Texas RE determined the root cause of the error to be “a misunderstanding of the reliability standard” because “Buffalo Gap was not aware that the series elements should have been included in the facility ratings regardless of which entity owned them.” The regional entity assessed the violation as a “moderate” risk to the reliability of the bulk power system, noting that no harm is known to have occurred as a result.
To mitigate the violation, Buffalo Gap agreed to verify and revise its one-line diagram to “as-built conditions,” along with revising its facility ratings documentation and rewriting the FRM to describe rating sources and its process for deriving ratings. It also contracted a third part to undertake compliance verifications and mock audits to ensure the utility was in compliance with the appropriate standards.
Facility ratings issues are a frequent cause of penalties that come before FERC, as noted earlier this year in a report by SERC Reliability. (See SERC Urges Industry Effort on Facility Ratings.) Experts have warned that as utilities adopt new generation resources and the BPS comes under stress from climate change-induced severe weather, operators will need to get serious about building awareness of the limits of their own systems.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The state has formed a multi-stakeholder task force to plan how to accelerate the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, its second largest source of emissions, through electrification, Gov. Phil Murphy told hundreds of attendees at a state-organized Clean Energy Conference on Monday.
The Clean Buildings Working Group — which will include union leaders, academics, experts in industry, environmental justice advocates, a builder, and private heating and energy companies — will focus on how best to implement the transition from fossil fuel heating, appliances and boilers to clean energy backed with energy efficiency strategies, state officials said.
The initiative will “help us ensure that we maximize the potential of every watt of green energy” as the state reaches for its goal of 100% clean energy by 2050, Murphy told the conference, at which more than 650 people registered to attend. The group will “focus on the job of making our current building stock more energy efficient and on ensuring that new buildings are arguably more so.”
“It will require a skilled workforce to employ new green building technologies,” Murphy said. “It will further require making needed health and safety repairs to low- and moderate-income housing to get them to the starting point for beneficial electrification. And it will require deploying deep federal investments in green building technologies equitably across should.”
Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University, who gave a keynote speech on “The Economics of Decarbonization” at the start of the second day of the conference, told the audience that while there have been a variety of strategies tried and some adopted across the nation on how to increase the use of electric vehicles or install more electric chargers, the challenge of converting buildings to clean energy is largely untouched.
“I’ve not seen any state yet quite crack the code on what the building standard is, what the building policy is, that every state that is interested in leading [on clean energy issues] should be following,” said Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab. The federal government has also largely left it alone, aside from recent funding for building electrification, leaving the states to act, he said.
“The state that cracks the code will see that replicated,” he said.
Tackling Building Emissions
Murphy’s working group initiative comes after the state has taken some strides in addressing building emissions but not with the same vigor as it has put into some other clean energy sectors, such as offshore wind and stimulating the uptake of electric vehicles and installation of electric chargers.
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) on Sept. 7 approved a program that will require 30,000 buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to annually report their water, gas and electricity use in an effort to stimulate conservation and cut energy use. (See NJ BPU Backs Utility Benchmarking for 30,000 Buildings.)
In addition, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has posted new rules on the New Jersey Register that would prevent it from issuing permits for new fossil fuel-fired boilers of 1 to 5 MMBtu unless it is “technically infeasible” to use a non-fossil fuel boiler. The rules could be enacted Dec. 6 if no major changes are made.
The introduction of the rules showed the sensitivity of some stakeholders to building electrification, with a coalition of 24 New Jersey business and union interests — among them some of the state’s largest business groups — lobbying to halt the state plan. The group says 5,500 buildings around the state would come under the boiler rules. (See Business Groups Try to Head off NJ Building Electrification Rules.)
The governor formed the working group in part because of the complicated nature of the task of electrifying buildings that are old and need extensive renovation, said Jane Cohen, executive director of the governor’s Office of Climate Action and the Green Economy.
“A lot of our housing and commercial buildings really need some significant health and safety and other types of repairs to get to the starting line to be able to partake in beneficial electrification,” said Catherine Klinger, a senior policy adviser to Murphy who will head the working group.
“Buildings are just more complicated than EVs and other types of green technology, because there are so many different types of buildings, so many different use cases,” she said. “There’s lots of legacy systems; you’re talking everything from delivered fuel and propane to old boilers and large multifamily and commercial buildings. So, there’s lots of different kinds of technologies that need to be employed, skillsets that you need in the workforce and strategies to decarbonize those different types of buildings.”
In addition, the state wants to ensure that low- to moderate-income residents and environmental justice communities get high priority in the allocation of resources for electrification, she said. The issue will be addressed in a similar way to the BPU’s recent Whole House pilot program, she said. The program, announced on Sept. 26, seeks to remediate health and safety hazards — such as electrical deficiencies and lead-based paint — in participant houses in coordination with the implementation of energy-efficiency measures.
Klinger said that through meetings and input from members, the group will be “looking at legislative levers, policy levers, funding incentives, and then out of those insights, our office will develop a roadmap to building decarbonization.”
Speaking after Murphy at the conference, FERC Commissioner Willie Phillips cited the Whole House program as one that other states can follow.
The program “is a beautiful combination of energy efficiency and equity,” he said, adding that “it recognizes that before any customer can take advantage of the clean energy transition, you have to make sure” that you take care of the fundamentals of their housing.
To embark on the clean energy transition, he said, “we have to acknowledge that equity must come first,” as New Jersey has done.
Phillips said that as a former president of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, he believes that “New Jersey has laid out a blueprint that many other states can follow” in a variety of issues, among them solar energy and offshore wind.
Phillips also took the opportunity to push for New Jersey and other states to take a long view of upgrading the grid. FERC in April proposed rules (RM21-17) that would direct transmission providers to revise their planning processes to, among many other things, identify infrastructure needs on a long-term, forward-looking basis and propose a list of benefits on which they would base their selections of proposed projects to meet those needs. (See FERC Issues 1st Proposal out of Transmission Proceeding.)
“If we don’t plan long-term, it’s going to hurt each and every one of you in your pocket because you are going to build out a dumb system for a smart future,” he said. Such a result would end up being expensive and is “going to hurt each and every person in this room.”
“It is no secret that our transmission needs have increased over the years,” he said, citing driving factors such as resource retirements, electrification of transportation and buildings and clean energy policies. “If we cannot do this affordably, we will not do it successfully,” he said, adding that further costs can be saved if “we squeeze as much capacity as we can out of the current system.”
“We are not requiring planners to elevate one particular policy over another. But what we are doing is saying, ‘This is the reality. This is what is happening. And it makes sense for us to consider these in our planning before they come up as a problem on our system,’” he said. “I am also proud to say that the proposed rule elevates the role of states regarding transmission buildout and cost allocation.”
Such a planning process would also help avoid “problems, and litigation and delays on the back end so that we can actually get some of this needed transmission built in an efficient manner.
Asked after the speech what are the biggest issues facing the grid, he cited “interconnection reform.”
“We have so many of our projects entering the interconnection queue, [and] we know that only 20% of those are going to be interconnected ultimately,” he said. “We have to figure out a way to undo that bottleneck to make sure that those projects can go ahead.”
He said the solution would be to go from a “serial, first-come, first-served process, to a clustered approach where it’s first-ready, first-served. The problem with the other 80% is they are caught in a situation that is “almost like a game,” he said.
“You know you are going to have to have for some projects very costly upgrades to the system. So, you see that those upgrades are needed and then you withdraw the project,” he said. “Then the person who finally gets lucky and gets in, they have to shoulder the cost of that upgrade and everybody else gets a free ride. That is what we are trying to solve.”
A California clean mobility program will open a $1 million funding round next month for nonprofits or public agencies to assess transportation needs in underserved communities.
Vouchers of up to $100,000 each will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. The application period opens on Nov. 2 at 9 a.m.
The vouchers are part of the Clean Mobility Options (CMO) program from the California Air Resources Board. CALSTART, a nonprofit group focused on clean transportation technologies, administers the program.
The vouchers will be available to tax-exempt nonprofits or public agencies. Examples of the latter include cities, counties, transit agencies or public school districts. Of the total funding, $200,000 has been set aside for tribal governments.
The proposals must cover areas that are disadvantaged, low-income or on tribal land.
Applicants may use their funding awards to identify transportation challenges in underserved communities and find ways to address them. The funds may be used to raise awareness of zero-emission mobility options such as car sharing or bike sharing.
Matching funds are not required.
Two Types of Awards
The CMO program is part of California Climate Investments, an initiative funded by cap-and-trade proceeds.
CMO includes two types of awards. Funding for community transportation needs assessments goes toward tasks such as information gathering, analysis and outreach. In the second type of award, CMO gives vouchers for specific mobility projects.
In its first funding window in 2020, CMO awarded $1.15 million for community transportation needs assessments to 24 applicants. Forty-one groups applied for the funds. The awards ranged from $18,750 to $50,000.
Also in its first funding window, CMO awarded $20 million to 21 applicants for zero-emission mobility projects in underserved communities.
The awards included $997,833 to the city of Chula Vista for an on-demand community shuttle serving seniors. The program, which launched in June 2022, will initially provide free rides in all-electric vehicles to passengers 55 and older in the northwest part of the city. Microtransit service Circuit operates the shuttle system.
Chula Vista plans to open the service to the general public in the second year, charging what it described as a small fare. The city received additional support for the project through a grant from the Community Congregational Development Corporation.
Another CMO award went to the Oakland Department of Transportation, which received $1 million for an e-bike “library.” The project will provide affordable medium- and long-term e-bike rentals in four disadvantaged Oakland neighborhoods, according to the city of Oakland.
About 500 e-bikes will be offered, including cargo bikes and adaptive bikes, which are designed for people with disabilities. The five-year project will be run by GRID Alternatives Bay Area in partnership with local bike shops.
Other types of projects that received CMO funding include electric vehicle car share programs, bike sharing and scooter sharing.
CMO expects to offer another round of mobility project vouchers next year.
The switch from natural gas to hydrogen for heating and use in heavy industry won’t be as easy to accomplish as the passage of recent legislation providing hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen.
“Hydrogen is not a universal solution to all of our energy problems,” Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, argued during a recent webinar produced by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Josephh Majkut, CSIS | CSIS
In a dialogue with National Grid Chief Strategy and External Affairs Officer Ben Wilson, moderated by CSIS policy expert Joseph Majkut, Hamburg argued that producing hydrogen either from electrolysis or by high-temperature reforming of natural gas will itself take energy that could be used for something else.
Wilson countered that a hurried electrification of home and commercial heating would put a significant load on the electrical grid and make existing challenges much more difficult.
But Hamburg predicted that hydrogen would leak from existing gas lines at whatever percentage added to natural gas because gas lines already leak methane, which is a much larger molecule. And he argued that hydrogen, while not a greenhouse gas, “causes reactions in the atmosphere that increase the impact of other greenhouse gases.”
Current leakage rates show just how difficult it will be to run a leak-free system, Hamburg said. Data on leakage of the gas distribution system in Boston, which includes a lot of plastic pipe, shows the scope of the problem, he said.
“Boston, on average, has 4-plus percent of methane emitted just from that distribution system. … At least half of that is coming from the houses and [other] users. When you put hydrogen in the system, that number will go up.”
Fractured Understanding
Four thousand miles away, in an unrelated webinar presented by Mission Hydrogen, GmbH, an independent German producer of hydrogen-focused weekly webinars, a University of Belgrade mechanical engineering professor said that hydrogen, even when mixed at a low percentage with natural gas, will embrittle and lead to cracks in cast iron as well as modern stainless steel pipelines, especially if there is pre-existing corrosion.
Milos Djukic, University of Belgrade | Mission Hydrogen
“There is a serious threat of hydrogen damage and catastrophic failure, particularly for old gas pipelines, and particularly after future long-term service and transportation of hydrogen in, for example, gas pipelines with pre-existing defects on the inner side,” Milos Djukic, an expert on stress fractures, said.
“We need to implement a structural integrity model for estimation of safety of such pipelines,” he said, adding that old pipelines carrying as little as 1% hydrogen and 99% natural gas have sustained serious degradation.
“The first research started in 1892,” he said of century-long efforts to understand the effect of hydrogen on metals. “We still do not have agreement about the true hydrogen-materials interaction at various scales,” he added, referring to the debate among metallurgists about the nature of hydrogen’s interaction with metals at the microscopic level and down to the size of atoms.
Djukic said there is much research underway, especially in the U.S., to figure out the rates of stress fractures caused by hydrogen and hydrogen-induced embrittlement in pipelines and associated parts.
David Wenger, Mission Hydrogen | Mission Hydrogen
“I’m a big advocate of hydrogen technology, and we must move in that direction,” Djukic told more than 2,500 viewers. “This presentation was just my effort to give some hints, but not to give a complete story of what should be done in order to bring a little bit more safety.”
European governments, especially Germany, are aiming to replace natural gas with hydrogen, leading to studies indicating that the region will soon see as many as 40,000 km of gas lines carrying hydrogen, once standards have been established, Mission Hydrogen founder David Wenger said.
“If you read such a study from the gas industry, what would you think? Is it realistic? Is more research needed? Is it safe? What’s your … [opinion] on thousands of kilometers of repurposed pipelines,” Wenger asked.
“That is the reason why in my slides I pointed out that such a comprehensive technical [and] scientific approach should be applied, and I gave some actual measures, what should be done, in order to provide safety,” Djukic replied.
A switch to hydrogen for heating is still just a discussion in the U.S., which is where EDF would like to keep it, arguing instead for conversion of home and commercial heating to air-source heat pumps.
Steven Hamburg, EDF | CSIS
“If we use electricity directly, we can decarbonize many times more of that infrastructure … than we can if we just use hydrogen,” Hamburg said in the CSIS discussion.
He also said there is a serious shortage of data about hydrogen — in this case, how much hydrogen would leak out of existing systems converted from pure gas to a mixture of gas and hydrogen, or even more uncertain, pure hydrogen.
“In the absence of data right now, we’re all speculating. And if we do have higher hydrogen emission rates, it could greatly undercut the net climate benefits. It could even cause more climate warming,” Hamburg argued.
Hybrid Strategy
Ben Wilson, National Grid | CSIS
Wilson said National Grid is developing a hybrid strategy to achieve decarbonization, in part because switching from gas to 100% electric heating in New York and New England, where the utility has electric customers, would strain the distribution and transmission systems and drive up prices.
“It’s got four elements,” he said of National Grid’s plan to decarbonize. “The first one is energy efficiency. We have incentive and grant programs available for our customers on that. The second one is that between now and 2050, we will progressively decarbonize 100% of the gas that we deliver through our networks, initially mostly with renewable natural gas, but then increasingly over time with green hydrogen.”
The company’s gas distribution system will see increasing volumes of renewable natural gas in this decade and, in the 2030s, increasing volumes of green hydrogen blended with the gas — up to 20% hydrogen by volume before hitting “the blend wall,” Wilson said. “Up to that level, the customer’s appliances can cope with that blend,” he said.
Higher hydrogen blends will require a change out of burner tips in home appliances, he said.
“Our strategy in the Northeast is a green hydrogen strategy, mainly because there’s no legacy gas production. There are no geologic storage facilities,” he said in reference to how utilities in other regions store gas.
“We forecast that by 2050, probably 75% of our customers will have an air-source heat pump, probably 50% of them will also still have gas heating, powered by decarbonized gas to top up because air-source heat pumps, particularly if you’ve got old legacy housing stock, will struggle when it’s really cold.”
He added that “having couple of delivery mechanisms rather than just one, we think is just a much more practical and faster and more affordable way to make the transition.”
Wilson said leakage rates, particularly in modern systems in which cast iron pipes have been replaced with plastic pipe, should be no more than 3% maximum.
“And if it’s green hydrogen produced close to the customer . . . there’s no gas gathering system. There’s no transmission with venting; it should be a much more manageable problem,” he said.
“I completely agree [with Hamburg’s concerns]. We don’t want to go from one solution to a new solution and create significant atmospheric issues,” Wilson said.
FERC on Monday rejected the Coalition of MISO Transmission Customers’ (CMTC) proposal to allow some load to exit the MISO system penalty-free given the current Midwestern capacity shortfall.
The commission said CMTC failed to prove that MISO’s current tariff practices are unjust and unreasonable just because they don’t contemplate allowing load to bow out when the capacity auction fails to procure enough supply (EL22-60).
CMTC argued before FERC in May that MISO should allow its customers to decrement their load without being charged capacity payment obligations to lessen the possibility of summer blackouts. (See MISO Customers Ask for Penalty-free Load Reductions.)
The group said reductions in load would help following MISO’s 2022/23 Planning Resource Auction (PRA), which unveiled a 1.2-GW capacity shortage across MISO Midwest, triggering a $236.66/MW-day cost of new generation entry (CONE) clearing price for the entire subregion. (See MISO’s 2022/23 Capacity Auction Lays Bare Shortfalls in Midwest.)
CMTC contended that when a deficit occurs, MISO should allow some load to depart the system to avoid the steep capacity prices and bolster reliability by trimming demand. The group suggested that the RTO could allow load exits up to the 1.2-GW auction shortage and stop accepting any further load reductions once the supply and demand imbalance is resolved.
But FERC said that CONE clearing prices are an intentional feature of the auction — not a bug — beckoning new resources into the market.
“We are not convinced that the 2022/2023 auction results constitute a change in circumstances,” the commission wrote.
FERC said load-serving entities have ways of hedging against high auction prices, including entering bilateral supply contracts ahead of the auction, “supporting the development of new facilities” or selling demand response capabilities.
“The ability to hedge against high auction prices and the various off-ramps from the auction is further evidence that the existing tariff provides opportunities to avoid potentially high prices in the auction and is not unjust and unreasonable as complainants claim,” FERC said.
The commission also said it wasn’t convinced that CMTC’s proposed solution would be just and reasonable. It said giving auction participants the chance to “shed an otherwise binding commitment after an auction is conducted” would undermine the auction’s prices that signal for resource planning and investment.
In a separate concurring opinion, Commissioner James Danly repeated concerns about the flood of intermittent resources in MISO’s interconnection queue and its dwindling dispatchable generation. He called the RTO’s current market design “inadequate to the task of procuring sufficient capacity.”
However, he admitted that the 2022/23 PRA functioned as intentioned “regardless of poor decisions by market participants or the long-term consequences of systemic defects in MISO’s capacity construct.”
“Why observers of MISO would shriek and clutch their pearls when the price rises to CONE in the event of a capacity shortfall … is beyond me. Anyone who gets upset about prices rising in times of scarcity cannot truly be a proponent of competitive markets,” Danly said.
MISO itself argued that processing and then resettling “a multitude of load exit requests” would be burdensome and require compliance controls. It said it foresaw “complex computation” and “needless litigation” if FERC greenlit penalty-free departures.
The RTO said it would likely be forced to replicate the auction with new levels of load so it could establish updated demand forecasts, different systemwide and zonal reserve requirements, and adjusted zonal resource credits. It said CMTC was oversimplifying a solution.
MISO’s Independent Market Monitor said CMTC’s complaint was “fundamentally incompatible with MISO’s market design and tariff.”
The Coalition of Midwest Power Producers added that CMTC was essentially seeking retroactive ratemaking and said if FERC granted the complaint, it would have “eroded investor confidence in all regional transmission organization/independent system operator markets and would also represent a disruptive precedent that others could seek similar cost avoidance.”
