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November 19, 2024

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Q&A: SERC CEO Jason Blake

SAVANNAH, Ga. — As SERC Reliability held the first in-person meeting of its Members and Board of Directors since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic this week, ERO Insider’s Holden Mann sat down with CEO Jason Blake to discuss how the coronavirus has changed regional entity’s culture and the challenges that lie ahead for the ERO Enterprise. The following exchange has been edited for clarity.

ERO Insider: As this is SERC’s first in-person meeting in almost two years, it seems appropriate to start by talking about some of the lessons you’ve learned from the changes to how SERC operates over the last few years. What kind of efficiencies have you discovered during the shift to remote work, and what are the things that you’ve found really need to be done in person?

Jason Blake: Well, it’s so commingled — I think some of the things that we’ve learned and the opportunities that we’ve had are also so intertwined with [the feeling of], “Oh, my goodness, I miss doing that.”

In terms of lessons learned [and] efficiency gains, [there’s] the way we do our monitoring and our audits. We’ve learned that for certain audits, we can be quite effective doing things virtually, so that’s a bit of a game changer. We may not need to bring everyone on site to conduct a certain audit. And we really pride ourselves on being risk based, so … if it’s a lower-risk type engagement, we should try to utilize these new tools of virtual engagements.

With that said, there are certain things that are hard to do virtually. You know, being able to walk down substations, or just the human interaction with the audit engagement that I believe is critically important. Our auditors don’t want to be seen as a cop out to give you a ticket, but rather an expert coming in to evaluate your programs and identify ways you can get better. And there’s so much value that happens with just the humanization that occurs when you’re in person.

It just feels very different than if we’re on a WebEx or [Microsoft Teams] call. You see body language, and then on top of that, you have the opportunity to have additional conversations in the hallway to seek clarification.

Q: How about SERC itself, and the working culture?

A: It’s really [been] wonderful to be able to move toward recognizing and establishing work life balance [and] creating the type of work environment where people can work remotely twice a week — [which is] our policy — yet, not wanting to let go of the value that we have.

It’s really important to our culture and who we are to be able to get together. I think there’s creativity, there’s connection, there’s just massive efficiency gains by being able to dip in someone’s office and ask a benign question, [which] you might not ever ask if you had to set up a WebEx or Teams [meeting]. And I think that there’s probably a [similar] concept with stakeholders: certain things they may never ask because they’re not in front of us.

I think the way we do our workshops and things like that, opening those up to be hybrid where people attend virtually … has some benefit to it as well for those that can’t make it. Trying to allow as may people [as possible] to hear the lessons learned we’re trying to share, or that type of outreach, I think has proven well. It’s also sparked a little innovation. We have e-learning modules that are on our website; we have an outreach and assistance team that’s voluntary, [where] if an entity’s struggling with something they can call us.

Q: You have a lot of veteran staff who had to adjust to working remotely during the pandemic. But you must also now have a significant cohort that joined during the pandemic and don’t know what it’s like to work in-person at SERC. Has it been a bit of a shock for them, going back to the office?

A: I think one of the great things about people is we’re adaptable. We had a large percentage of our workforce who really struggled when we went full remote; of course, you also have some individuals that felt quite comfortable quickly. We’re all wired in our own ways.

There are definitely upsides about being able to work remotely: all kinds of family-related things become simpler. That’s why I’m so big on the hybrid [model], to help people with work-life balance while also realizing the benefits of returning to the office. It’s been two years, effectively, so we want to make sure people are comfortable with the new world we live in.

We are focused on having people recall what it was like to be together that we so valued before the pandemic. It’s been really refreshing to see the energy in the hallways: people standing in another person’s [doorway] having a conversation, laughing, or talking about work or whatever. But we had to be very thoughtful about trying to bring people in and understanding that we’re going to have different risk tolerances. So we are being thoughtful as we possibly can, while still trying to do what’s best for our mission.

Q: Cybersecurity and cyber hygiene became a major concern early in the pandemic. (See PPE, Testing Top Coronavirus Concerns for NERC.) How did this risk affect your work at SERC, both in the early stages of remote work and ongoing? 

A: I think the biggest thing is, it just makes us re-evaluate lots of basic, underlying assumptions. It makes us think about the types of devices we’re disseminating to staff: How well protected are they? How locked down are they? Same with [smart phones]: everyone has one with them, right? Do we have those as secure and as locked down as we possibly can?

So there’s definitely focused energy there, which would have needed to occur regardless because of the nature of what we do. People want to be mobile with their information, regardless of whether they’re in the office for a set amount of time or not. One thing that [we’ve] noticed is the phishing [attacks], the smishing — which is when they do it via text — and all kinds of other things. We just learned that QR codes can be corrupted … and that can be a way to get into your system.

Cyber attackers have gotten so creative, and it’s constantly moving and evolving … [and] it only takes one person to make a mistake, which is scary. One person opening something or downloading something that they could potentially spread. So it’s training, training, training, and practice. We do drills; we have an IT department that enjoys trying to catch people, and they do a really good job. But it’s vigilance, and it’s exhausting because you can’t let your guard down.

Q: One of the things we heard about in the meeting today is the escalating cyber risk caused by the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. (See “Cybersecurity and Ukraine,” SERC Board of Directors/Members Briefs: March 30, 2022.) How do you see SERC’s mission in the bulk power system, not just as a regulator but as a resource for the ecosystem or the utilities? How can you be a productive part of that system?

A: With things like cyber, you have known risks, you have emerging risks and you have unknown risks. There are things that we know are out there, but we also know that the adversaries are getting more sophisticated and motivated; the threats are getting more complex; geopolitical tensions are volatile. So there has to be a great deal that you don’t know about.

I have a medical analogy that I’ve used quite a bit. The first [step] is preventative medicine: you go to your doctor. Your doctor doesn’t want you to get sick, and so they say, eat these types of things, exercise, practice this type of hygiene and so on. This is the best of what we know now, and if you do this, it will reduce the likelihood of you getting ill. So we have an outreach team and assistance team, which does exactly that. They set up workshops about emerging issues, or about proven mitigation strategies.

The second [stage] is like your annual checkup. If your doctor knows about known risks and who you are and your potential issues that you could get sick [from], and they run a periodic annual checkup, you leave feeling a little bit more confident and in a better situation. I think the analogy there goes to our monitoring team. They use the reliability standards, the [Critical Infrastructure Protection] standards, which are robust, to make sure you have controls in place … [and] have a very strong and secure posture.

The third part of my analogy ties to the emergency room … and that is when something has occurred and you’re having challenges. Sometimes it could be nothing more than allergies, [but] sometimes, you may have a programmatic issue. And there’s where I see our role. I think this is one of the most important roles that we have.

It’s not just about fining — that’s important, because we want to send a message that this is not all right. But what I believe is most important are ensuring effective mitigation plans are in place. We don’t want to just check a box; we really want to get in there, roll our sleeves up and understand the root cause to make sure we’re setting our entities up so that we’re not only addressing the issue, but that it’s sustainable for the future.

Q: One of the other things that you talked about was the ERO’s transformation: we’re pivoting to renewable resources, and there’s a lot more public attention being paid to the question of reliability and resilience, especially after last year’s events in Texas. Can you talk about the coming challenges for the ERO and regional entities like SERC?

A: I think what we’re seeing is the maturation of the ERO model. Generally speaking, when things first started out, I think our model was much more centered around compliance. And at some point, I think around 2010 or 2011, we became more focused on understanding the why — why are we doing this? I have a hard time believing anybody wakes up and says, “I can’t wait to be compliant today!” I think the why is, “I can’t wait to wake up and make sure that the grid is reliable and secure.” It powers communities; it’s vital to the health and safety of my hometown, a big city, the economy.

And once you come to realize that, then you move to the concept [that] these are tools. Compliance is incredibly important, but it’s a tool to ensure things are reliable and secure. The standards are designed to [ensure] good utility practice. You need to do these things to make sure you’re secure and resilient. So once you can see the big picture, then you start evaluating — what other tools you have, that you [may be] already using, but maybe not in the most effective way.

I believe the regions — SERC and NERC and other regions — have done a really nice job on upping their collective game with the long-term reliability assessment, seasonal assessments and those things. But we cannot draw up those reports, or observe things such as the Odessa event or the [winter storms] in Texas and just write up a really good report and set it on the shelf.

It’s incumbent on us not only to make sure that our stakeholders know. … You have state legislators, you have policymakers [who are] making really complicated decisions. They’re struggling with ideas that have real reliability [and] security implications, and we really do need to improve our capabilities and ability to get in front of them and make sure that as an independent resource, [we’re] just explaining … the challenges … the opportunities, [and] the limitations … so that they can make their decisions. It’s not about driving decisions in any way whatsoever, but just making sure they are in the best position possible.

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Western Power Pool Names New CEO

The Western Power Pool has named industry veteran Sarah Edmonds as its new president and CEO, a role in which she will be responsible for furthering the aspirations of WPP’s Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) throughout much of the Western Interconnection.

“We are truly fortunate to have retained Sarah Edmonds because she brings exactly the right mixture of experience, credibility, and integrity to build on the WPP’s strong foundation, and we are confident she can move it forward with purpose and innovation,” WPP Chairman Bill Drummond said in a March 24 statement.

Edmonds is currently director of transmission and reliability services at Portland General Electric, a job she plans to leave April 18, WPP said. Her prior roles included serving as vice president and general counsel at PacifiCorp Transmission.

Edmonds has been a key player in designing WRAP and in other organizational efforts in the Western grid, including development of the governance structure of the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM).

Edmonds-Sarah-at-EIM-RIF-2018-03-09-RTO-Insider-FI.jpgSarah Edmonds has been named the new CEO of Western Power Pool. | © RTO Insider LLC

“Her move is seen as an important continuation of her extensive work on regional grid matters,” the WPP statement said.

Edmonds said in the statement she is looking forward to “teaming up with the WPP’s Board and staff to propel the organization into the next stage of excellence to meet the needs and aspirations of the Western Power Pool membership.”

Edmonds will replace outgoing President Frank Afranji, who is retiring after leading the organization for four years and establishing the WRAP. (See Retiring WPP Head Foresees Increased Collaboration on Western RA.)

Earlier this year, the Northwest Power Pool rebranded itself as the Western Power Pool, signifying its expanding reach across the Western Interconnection.

What was once a member-run organization focused mainly on grid reliability in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain regions, Portland, Ore.-based WPP spent the past two years growing south and east.

WPP has been developing WRAP since 2020, initially to address concerns that Northwest utilities have been unknowingly drawing on the same shrinking pool of reliability resources, but interest in the effort spread to other parts of the West.

The WRAP, which is slated to launch a “nonbinding” iteration in the third quarter of this year, has attracted participants in an area spanning from British Columbia south to Arizona and east into South Dakota. Stage 1 of the WRAP will include 26 participants that together represent a summer peak load of about 67,000 MW and a winter peak of more than 65,000 MW.

In creating the WRAP, WPP has also been forced to repurpose itself as an organization. Once the WRAP enters its “binding” phase in 2023, the program and WPP will become subject to federal oversight and FERC rules.

Anticipating those requirements, WPP has moved to restructure its governance and prepare to adopt some elements of an RTO, such as the appointment of an independent board of directors. WPP has created an RA Participants Committee and will establish a Committee of States to ensure that utility regulators have a voice in discussions related to the WRAP. (See RA Program will Require Restructuring of NWPP.)

Edmonds has played a leading role in those efforts.

WPP has not signaled intentions to expand the WRAP’s offerings beyond resource adequacy but appears increasingly as a possible platform for incrementally developing a Western RTO — one that would compete with CAISO’s stalled regionalization efforts, the ISO’s well-established WEIM, and SPP’s nascent RTO West and Western Energy Imbalance Service.

WPP last year selected SPP to operate the technical aspects of the WRAP, providing the market’s forward-showing functions, modeling and system analytics, and real-time operations.

The WPP board selected Edmonds after a months-long search for an experienced industry professional with “demonstrated knowledge of the increasingly complex regional and interregional grid issues faced by the Western U.S. and Western Canada,” it said.

Edmonds “has stood out amongst her peers in helping to steer the development the Western Resource Adequacy Program development effort,” Debra Smith, CEO of Seattle City Light, said in the statement. “Her keen mind and expertise in utility regulatory and governance concepts, and her relationships across the landscape of stakeholders will be a tremendous asset to the WPP and its membership.”

“Nobody is better positioned to steer the organization through the WRAP implementation into the binding program and whatever comes next,” Smith said.

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EPSA Panel Debates Role of ISOs, RTOs in Decarbonization

WASHINGTON ― Competitive power markets just do decarbonization better, according to Brian George, senior director of strategic policy and government affairs for the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), moderating a panel on decarbonization at his organization’s Competitive Power Summit at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

Citing figures from the Energy Choice Coalition, George said that from 2005 to 2021, power sector emissions in regions with organized wholesale electricity markets were down 35% compared to a 27% reduction in regions without such markets. Even deeper cuts were reported in wholesale markets with larger amounts of competitively owned generation, such as ISO-NE, which saw a 61% drop in carbon emissions, George said.

But looking ahead, George and five industry executives on the panel, envisioned power markets combining the reliability benefits of RTOs and ISOs with other market structures aimed at coordinating resources and controlling costs in response to a range of increasingly ambitious state, local and corporate clean energy targets.

ISO-NE CEO Gordon van Welie summarized the challenge organized power markets face, especially if the end goal is President Joe Biden’s 100% decarbonized grid by 2035. “If you’re going to run a system where the bulk of the energy is going to come from the sun and the wind and is inherently unpredictable, you have to have some other energy source that is stable,” van Welie said.

Further complicating the picture, George said, the industry’s focus on reliability is often equated with a resistance to the clean energy transition.

Stephen Gallagher, chief commercial officer for developer Brookfield Renewable U.S., also cited the staggering cost of grid decarbonization. “If you lay out all the plans, both public and private sector, in terms of decarbonization by 2050, that’s $150 trillion of investment — that’s trillion,” he said.

His company has grown from developing solar projects to working with corporate clients to plan and finance their transition to clean power. “That’s going to take time,” Gallagher said. Transitioning the economy to “fully green” is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

“For us, it’s working with everybody, working with complex growth and goals on budgetary constraints.”

“So, how do we apply markets to all this?” van Welie said. “There are markets that utilize uniform clearing price auctions and marginal pricing, and I think those apply very well to attracting the capital needed for balancing resources, and I think they can be modified to attract renewable energy as well.”

John Moore, director of the Sustainable FERC Project, also favors competitive markets for meeting reliability needs —but combined with some kind of forward clean energy market (FCEM) or centralized market for state, local and corporate mandates.

Capacity markets could evolve to “capability markets,” Moore said, “to address some of the different types of needs we’re going to have with meeting much more than just a traditional peak-load day with different types of resources,” including major amounts of distributed power.

“I think the states are going to have to recognize the value of something like a centralized clean energy market, and you’re going to have to cut the number of products a bit,” he said. “There are so many different clean energy mandates, requirements, and they’re not going to work in any decentralized fashion.”

Echoing other energy industry executives at the summit, Arne Olson, senior partner at Energy + Environmental Economics (E3), said setting a carbon price would be the quickest way to scale clean energy. (See related story, EPSA Members Renew Call for Carbon Price; See Long ‘Bridge’ for Gas.)

While politically unfeasible, a carbon price is “still useful to hold up as a benchmark” for thinking about the next-best alternative, which Olson believes is a bilateral clean energy market.

“We like that better than an organized FCEM because an organized FCEM seems to be defined around one system, one ISO,” Olson said. “There’s no reason that PJM should have a separate price for clean energy attributes, or that ISO-New England should.”

The value of reducing carbon emissions everywhere should not constantly change, he said.

Van Welie agreed that integrating the environmental attributes of different energy sources would be key. “If you don’t put the externalities into the market design, if you don’t take into account the supply-side friction, the markets are not going to work.”

The Four Pillars

Designing these future markets will depend on what van Welie called “four pillars” — increasing amounts of renewables, dramatically expanded transmission, market structures that are generation-technology neutral, and balancing resources for “energy adequacy.”

“When you think about the grid, it’s fairly simple. It’s a collection of wires and a bunch of devices converting energy inputs into electricity,” he said. “If our wholesale market structures and the various regulatory processes we have around the structure don’t give us four pillars of equal strength, something’s going to break down and we’re going to have adverse outcomes.”

A holistic conversation about market evolution is needed, he said. States are primarily focused on clean energy goals, which leaves out transmission and, he said, don’t begin to consider the distribution system.

ISO-NE’s winter peak is now around 20 GW, van Welie said. “The 2050 plan shows it will be close to 60 MW,” and scaling the system up to meet that demand will require “massive amounts of investment in the transmission system.”

ISO-NE’s recent Pathways Study found that existing market structures — the status quo — are “by far the most expensive and the most inefficient” for decarbonizing the grid, van Welie said. One example: “We end up having more storage deployed in order to allow renewables to capture various clean energy attributes,” he said.

Carbon pricing was identified as the most efficient path to decarbonization. (See Draft Study Weighs Tradeoffs of CO2 Pricing, FCEM for ISO-NE.) While a regional or national carbon market is not on the table politically, van Welie’s next-best “is to put [carbon pricing] into the ISO markets, and we’re going to need to have the states tell us what number [of emissions reduction] they want.”

Education, Cooperation, Regulatory Certainty

Looking at the obstacles ahead, panelists raised several issues.

As a developer, Gallagher’s top concern was regulatory certainty. Developers are renegotiating contracts, and in some cases, customers are walking away from projects, he said.

“Not all customers are created equal. Some are very sophisticated, some are not, and they can get scared away with some of the complexity,” he said. “What they need is assurance on executions, so they are willing to pay a premium to make sure” projects are completed, and “right now, that’s not happening.”

Echoing other executives at the summit, Jill Davies, senior vice president of energy trading at Shell Energy Americas, stressed the critical role natural gas will play in the energy transition, providing reliability to markets.

At the same time, she said, “There’s still a lot we can do even to lower emissions across the value chain,” like co-locating solar and storage or carbon capture and natural gas plants.

But Davies also called for “innovation and technology to step in to help us do a better job of forecasting. The role of planning is going to be critical going forward to understand how cities will grow. Where will load be? How will we stress test our systems for climate change … with energy demands that we’ve seen in the U.S. extreme weather events?”

Still another obstacle is the lack of understanding — by regulators, policy makers and the general public — of the complexity and scope of the challenge ahead, and how long the clean energy transition will take, Davies said.

With the accelerating pace of coal plant retirements, people need to realize “it’s not a one-for-one transfer,” she said. “If you retire a coal plant or a gas power generation plant, you just can’t replace it with one solar farm. You need orders of magnitude [of] greater megawatts, and you also need geographic diversification.”

Those pushing for urgent, ambitious clean energy targets also must recognize “that people are not willing to compromise,” she said. “Often times, they don’t want pipelines built where they live; they don’t want to look out their windows and see wind farms.”

Moore agreed with the need for public education. He and other industry insiders “are stunned on a daily basis over the real incomplete level of understanding that policy makers, regulators, legislators all have about how the grid works, and what the implications are for having made at a state level, for example, serious climate commitments in lots of respects, and then not knowing what that ultimately means for consumers and the environment.”

Both he and Davies also called for more cooperation between states and ISOs and RTOs. As more renewables come on the grid, the power a state uses may increasingly come from outside its boundaries, Moore said. States will have to work together, “simplifying products, simplifying the number of local mandates, looking to markets to be more of a resource,” he said. “That’s got to change.”

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PJM Requests Rehearing of FTR Credit Requirement Filing

PJM on Thursday asked FERC to rehear a previous decision rejecting the RTO’s plan to modify its financial transmission rights credit requirement calculation, defending its original December filing (ER22-703).

The commission on Feb. 28 rejected PJM’s proposal to modify the FTR credit requirement by implementing an initial margin calculation from a historical simulation (HSIM) model using a 97% confidence interval, saying the RTO failed to support the plan because its independent auditors only validated the model at a 99% confidence interval.

FERC directed the RTO to file within 60 days to show cause why its existing FTR credit requirement remains just and reasonable or explain what tariff changes will remedy the commission’s concerns. (See FERC Rejects PJM’s FTR Credit Requirement Proposal.)

Stakeholders voting at a March 23 PJM Members Committee meeting endorsed a motion for the RTO to refile the original proposal “accompanied by some new supporting rationale.” (See Stakeholders Encourage PJM to Defend FTR Filing.)

“The Feb. 28 order errs by disregarding nearly all of the substantial evidence PJM presented in support of the December Section 205 filing,” PJM said in its rehearing request.

Rehearing Request

In its filing Thursday, PJM said it presented “abundant evidence” supporting its December filing to show the proposed use of the 97% confidence interval was just and reasonable and that FERC’s February order “addresses little of that evidence.” The RTO said the commission’s order limited discussion of the 97% confidence interval to two aspects, including:

      • an independent auditor’s evaluation of the HSIM model, “offered only as a supplemental check on the model’s technical capability,” which the order discounted because the model reviewed by the auditor used a 99% confidence interval; and
      • the estimation that the overall level of collateral would be lower under the HSIM with a 97% confidence interval “compared to the level of collateral under the current effective rules” and that the proposed tariff revisions don’t show how “sufficient collateral to address the riskiest market participants” will be collected.

“Neither of these bases for the rejection of the December Section 205 filing is well-founded, and both should be withdrawn on rehearing,” PJM said in its request. “The Feb. 28 order never engages with the large bulk of the evidence PJM provided in support of the HSIM with a 97% confidence interval — as if that evidence had never been presented. Such fundamental failure by the commission to address the record evidence is a signal of unlawful agency conduct, which the commission now has an opportunity to correct on rehearing.”

PJM highlighted three issues it took away from the commission’s February order.

First, PJM said the order asserted the RTO did not demonstrate the HSIM model “would operate as represented across extreme events or that the initial margin estimates would cover expected losses.” PJM said back-testing analyses included in the filing “made those very demonstrations” and that FERC “misunderstands the limited purpose of the additional check provided by the independent auditors’ validation of the HSIM model.”

PJM said the back-testing failure rate, or the instances when the initial margin was not adequate to cover potential losses, “did not exceed 3% which is consistent with the model confidence interval of 97%.”

“The Feb. 28 order erred in disregarding PJM’s evidence that the HSIM model with a 97% confidence interval would operate as represented across extreme events, and that the initial margin estimates would cover expected losses,” PJM said.

Second, PJM said FERC’s order disregarded recent RTO tariff revisions regarding the “assessment of participant riskiness” and misinterpreted how the HSIM addresses risk when looking at the 97% confidence interval.

PJM noted that FERC found that the RTO “failed to demonstrate that its proposed FTR credit revisions are reasonably calibrated to ensure that market participants will be required to provide adequate collateral relative to the risks of their positions” because the “proposed 97% confidence interval would result in a reduction in market participants’ aggregate collateral commitments relative to the existing FTR credit requirement.”

“It is possible the Feb. 28 order is using interchangeably the distinct issues of the riskiest participants (which concern a particular participant’s demonstrated ability and willingness to honor its financial obligations) and the riskiest portfolios or positions (which concern the level of risk that the potential losses on a particular portfolio might exceed the posted collateral),” PJM said in its request.

Finally, PJM said FERC’s conclusion that the RTO did not demonstrate the 97% confidence interval is just and reasonable “assumes away most of the evidence PJM did present.”

PJM said it demonstrated that the failure rate under the 97% confidence interval “was less than 2%, compared to an 8% failure rate under the currently effective rules.” It also said testimony from Chief Risk Officer Nigeria Bloczynski showed the 97% confidence interval embodies “a high confidence interval and a significant improvement to the PJM collateral practices.”

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NHSaves Supreme Court Cases Dropped; Program Approval Still Pending

The nonprofit Listen Community Services has dropped its appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court challenging a Public Utilities Commission order last fall that upended the NHSaves energy efficiency program.

Listen’s decision to withdraw the appeal Monday follows similar action from four other parties earlier this month. The nonprofit cited passage of H.B. 549 as the reason for the withdrawal, saying that the law signed by Gov. Chris Sununu in February addresses “many of the substantive issues on appeal.” (See NH Large Business Sector Takes Biggest Hit in Revised EE Budget.)

Parties to the docket for the 2021-2023 Triennial Energy Efficiency Plan (DE 20-092) asked the PUC in December 2020 to approve a settlement they reached governing the new program. The PUC denied the request, reworking the foundation of the program in a way that brought the state’s EE industry to a standstill because of funding uncertainty. Parties asked for a review of the order, but the PUC denied the request. They moved to the courts to appeal the order, reaching the state’s highest court in February.

The Office of the Consumer Advocate was the first to withdraw its appeal, having agreed to do so if the PUC suspended the part of its order specific to program rates and revert them to the levels of the prior triennial plan. H.B. 549 has a similar effect to the OCA’s agreement, putting a formula into law for how NHSaves will be funded. Regulators rushed the law through the legislature to resolve concerns about the PUC’s order.

In its March 3 notice of withdrawal, the OCA said that the new law doesn’t address “every legal infirmity” in the PUC’s order or the procedures used to issue it, but the law makes any outstanding controversy “academic in nature.”

Eversource Energy withdrew its appeal March 3, and Clean Energy NH and Conservation Law Foundation withdrew a joint appeal March 15.

Program Approval

Despite the clarity for program rates and structure provided in H.B. 549, it still requires the PUC to approve an updated plan for 2022-2023, filed by the state’s utilities March 1. The plan cuts the originally proposed NHSaves budget for the two years by about 50%, based on the new rate structure set in the law.

The commission must decide on the plan by May 1. In a March 16 procedural order, the PUC set a hearing for April 21, saying it will seek additional input on whether changes to the program are reasonable based on guidelines of H.B. 549.

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SERC Board of Directors/Members Briefs: March 30, 2022

SAVANNAH, Ga. — “It’s so amazing to see people in three dimensions,” joked NERC CEO Jim Robb on Wednesday, as SERC Reliability held its first in-person Members and Board of Directors meetings since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his opening remarks at the Members Meeting, Robb reminisced that one of his first assignments, when “I had been the CEO of NERC for about two days,” was to deliver a briefing to SERC’s board. He said that despite the arrival of pandemic restrictions, the last two years have seen “so much positive change at NERC and the way NERC and the regional entities work together,” with SERC playing a significant role.

“I think because of the proximity of Atlanta to [SERC headquarters in] Charlotte, we had a little bit of a special relationship,” Robb said.

“I really want to take my hat off also to the SERC staff, because [I’ve seen] them showing up over the last two to three years in very different ways than we would have seen them before. … The team here [is] leaning in and [has] really become very positive contributors to the ERO Enterprise overall.”

SERC CEO Jason Blake returned Robb’s compliments, speaking of NERC’s willingness to include regional entity CEOs in the development of the ERO Enterprise Strategic Plan. Blake likened SERC to “a player on this team” that needs to bring “everything [it] can … to really advance” the good of the entire organization.

Wednesday also marked the one-year anniversary of the first board meeting under SERC’s new governance structure, which was adopted in January 2021. The new structure instituted SERC’s members group, which meets once a year alongside the Board of Directors, and also reorganized the board structure to include three independent directors.

Lonni Dieck, a member of that first class of independent directors who attended their first meeting a year ago, thanked SERC’s board and staff for helping them “up the learning curve,” while also “being very receptive to our suggestions and feedback.”

New Sector Directors Welcomed

Dieck, SERC’s lead independent director, was one of three board officers — along with Chair Todd Hillman and Vice Chair Pandelis Xanthakos — whose terms the board agreed to extend for an additional year. Instead of leaving their posts on May 21, 2022, they will leave a year later. The extension was suggested because the same bylaw changes creating the membership structure and independent directors also specified that officers serve terms of two years. Because the three took office Jan. 1, 2021, leaving this May would have cut short their terms at one year, five months.

Todd Hillman Jason Blake Lonni Dieck 2022-03-30 (RTO Insider LLC) Alt FI.jpgLeft to right: SERC Board Chair Todd Hillman, CEO Jason Blake, and Director Lonni Dieck | © RTO Insider LLC

The board also approved revising current directors’ terms to end on May 31 rather than June 31 as before, once more due to the new bylaws. The only exceptions were the independent directors, who took office Jan. 31, 2021, and thus would have ended their terms on Dec. 31, 2022. Their terms were modified to end May 31, 2023, for Shirley Bloomfield and Deborah Wheeler, and May 31, 2024 for Dieck (who will stay on as a director for another year after her term as an officer expires).

In addition, the board welcomed three new sector directors at Wednesday’s meeting: Virgil Hobbs of Southeastern Power Administration, representing the Federal-State sector; Adrianne Collins of Southern Company Services, representing investor-owned utilities; and Eric Laverty of ACES Power, from the marketer sector. They respectively replaced outgoing directors Bob Dalrymple of Tennessee Valley Authority, Nelson Peeler of Duke Energy Carolinas, and Brad Cox of Tenaska Power Services.

2023 Business Plan and Budget

SERC’s board approved the RE’s 2023 business plan and budget for posting and submission to NERC.

Next year’s budget is proposed to rise to $27.8 million, up 4.1% over last year’s budget of $26.7 million; the RE’s assessment is also planned to rise 4.8%, to $26 million. SERC plans to release about $1.6 million from its assessment stabilization reserve to cover the balance.

The board’s approval of the draft budget was conditioned on SERC’s Finance and Audit Committee investigating the current employment market to determine whether the market adjustment category — which governs spending on merit-based raises and promotions — should be expanded beyond its current planned increase of 3%. According to the resolution, expansion to this category “shall not exceed an additional 1.5% increase.”

Cybersecurity and Ukraine

Stephen Brown, SERC’s director of cyber and physical security, reminded members to be on their guard against potential cyberattacks by Russia’s intelligence services. Security experts and the government have issued repeated warnings about the potential for Russia to turn its cyber capabilities against global targets as its military operations in Ukraine drag on. (See White House Issues Fresh Russian Cyber Warning.)

Brown said that Russia’s military and intelligence services have multiple cyberattack teams, which have been known to compete with each other by launching multiple attacks on the same target. One of these groups was charged in 2020 for a series of attacks around the world, including assaults on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2017. (See Six Russians Charged for Ukraine Cyberattacks.)

“This is a critical moment in our history, as we have the opportunity to assist our industry and country,” Brown said. “We want to ask all of our entities and committees to adopt the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s [CISA] Shields Up recommendations and have a heightened posture when it comes to cybersecurity and protecting their most critical assets. Just as important, if you’re not already a member of the [E-ISAC], we encourage you to join. … They have relationships with [CISA] and the [FBI] that give them the ability to see from a global risk perspective and see potential threats that impact cybersecurity not only from a global standpoint, but specifically for our industry.”

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New York Proposes Opt-out CDG Program

New York state officials on Tuesday issued a straw proposal for integrating community distributed generation (CDG) into community choice aggregation (CCA) on an opt-out basis (14-M-0224).

The Public Service Commission initiated the CDG program to give utility customers a chance to participate in distributed solar regardless of whether they own a residence or business suitable for installing panels.

“Opt-out CDG encourages municipal governments — and their constituents — to take control of their energy future through locally driven CDG participation,” Department of Public Service said in the proposal. “Staff is confident that a robust opt-out CDG program will encourage a multitude of new administrators to join the CCA market, including public and nonprofit organizations, leading to an increase in market competition which could spur innovation by means of the CCA model.”

CCA “is a municipal model for procuring energy that replaces the utility as the default supplier of electricity and/or natural gas for virtually all homes and small businesses within a jurisdiction.” All utility customers financially support clean generation facilities through surcharges added to their bills.

The commission decided to focus the program on residential and other small customers because they otherwise would not be able to benefit from clean distributed energy resources. The opt-out model of implementation is designed to pull more customers into the program, given people’s tendency to take the path of least resistance: Customers in the municipality would be automatically enrolled, unless they opt out.

Structure and Rules

The commission’s November procedural order directed that the proposal detail the program’s operation, oversight and enforcement. The DPS held two public webinars in February and incorporated some of the comments into its recommendations.

Staff recommended that two unique products be offered to municipalities: standalone CDG, or CDG in addition to becoming a CCA. Much of the proposal is concerned with rules to minimize confusion for those customers in a CCA; the timelines for the CDG opt-out and CCA supply will not necessarily line up. It also accounts for customers already enrolled in a CDG program.

“We understand that a combined offering for [municipalities] who choose to offer both supply and CDG will allow for greater energy options and consumer choices,” Michael O’Donnell, DPS utility analyst, said during the first webinar. “We need to guarantee that customers who already have a supply product are not confused by another product offering or misguided by the timing of the offerings.”

The straw proposal also recommends that the following customers, who are ineligible to be opt-out enrolled in CCA supply, be eligible for opt-out enrollment in CDG:

  • time-of-use or time varying rate customers;
  • Assistance Program Participant (APP) customers;
  • customers with energy service company (ESCO) blocks on their utility accounts; and
  • customers who are being served by an ESCO.

The proposal recommends that low-income APP customers be the first members to be subscribed in the municipalities’ programs, and that they should continue to receive their CDG credits and not be dropped or unsubscribed because of any change in their APP status.

Crediting Methods

The proposal recommends that programs use the state’s current net-crediting model — for now.

“Under net-crediting, the utility keeps 1% of credits generated each month for billing administrative purposes, a minimum of 5% of credits go to the customers, and the remaining value is paid to CDG owners by the utility, according to the proposal. “This model guarantees savings for customers participating in CDG.”

However, under the proposal, the state could adopt a credit pooling mechanism, proposed by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and National Grid and approved by the PSC in January for the Expanded Solar for All (E-SFA) program (19-E-0735).

Credit pooling was adapted from commercial and industrial practices to allow residential customers to share the energy produced from an eligible renewable resource and receive bill credits based on the production of the facility. It potentially offers considerable efficiencies for CCA administrators, customers and utilities, Max Joel, assistant director of the NY-Sun program at NYSERDA, said at the first webinar.

Admin Details

The state also recommends that CCA administrator fees for opt-out CDG be paid exclusively by the owner of the project serving the aggregation. In addition, fees can be calculated based on percentage, per kilowatt-hour or per customer. CCA administrators must clearly present their proposed fee structure in proposals to municipalities, made through a competitive municipal bid process with NYSERDA’s assistance, including the method by which fees will be calculated.

The state is requesting further stakeholder feedback on CDG capacity to decide whether a cap, block, carve-out or some other mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure all New Yorkers have access to CDG, either through an opt-in or opt-out model.

Customers living in utility territories with limited potential for CDG development, or with insufficient project pipeline capacity, “should not be jeopardized by opt-out CDG programs operating within their utility service territory,” the proposal said.

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Nevada Joins Multistate Effort to Electrify Trucks, Buses

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said Thursday that he has signed on to a multistate agreement to work toward a goal of 100% sales of zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty trucks by 2050.

Sixteen other states, the District of Columbia and the Canadian province of Quebec previously signed the memorandum of understanding, which was announced in July 2020.

The aim of the agreement is to accelerate the market for electric trucks, ranging from large pickups and vans to delivery trucks, school and transit buses, and long-haul vehicles. The group’s interim target is at least 30% zero-emission truck sales by 2030.

In addition to Nevada, signatories of the agreement include the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

The jurisdictions represent 40% of the U.S. population and 35% of registered medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, according to Sisolak’s office.

Sisolak made the announcement via a pre-recorded video during a Las Vegas event hosted by the nonprofit Electrification Coalition.

“By working across states and with many partners, we can accomplish much more together than we could do individually,” Sisolak said.

Sisolak said the agreement will help Nevada meet its goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and position the state to respond to federal regulatory changes.

Reducing Risks

The Electrification Coalition welcomed the announcement.

“States are playing a key role in the vital work to transform our transportation system, and Nevada’s participation in this commitment represents a substantial boost to our momentum,” Katherine Stainken, the coalition’s vice president of policy, said in a statement.

In a June letter to Sisolak, the coalition urged Nevada to join the agreement to address the public health, economic and national security risks arising from the transportation sector’s oil dependence. The letter was signed by representatives of 41 businesses, including Amply, EVgo, Mack Trucks, Proterra, Rivian, Siemens, Volvo Group North America and Nestle USA.

Western Resource Advocates also commended Sisolak for bringing Nevada into the agreement.

“We applaud Gov. Sisolak for this important step that recognizes the need to reduce the harmful fossil-fuel emissions from medium- and heavy-duty trucks in Nevada that contribute to climate change,” Cameron Dyer, Western Resource Advocates’ managing senior staff attorney in Nevada, said in a statement.

But WRA called on the state to do more, including following California’s lead in adopting an Advanced Clean Trucks regulation. The regulation requires vehicle manufacturers to sell zero-emission trucks as an increasing percentage of their annual California sales from 2024 to 2035.

Draft Plan Released

Signatories to the agreement are working together through a ZEV task force being facilitated by the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM).

Last month, the group released a draft action plan that includes more than 60 recommendations for state policymakers to promote widespread deployment of zero-emission trucks.

The recommendations cover areas such as sales and fleet purchase requirements; purchase incentives for ZEVs and related infrastructure; electric utility and utility regulator actions; financing for fleet conversions; and outreach and education.

One of the plan’s recommendations is that states work together to support development of a standardized and reliable fast-charging network for trucks. States should also advocate for changes to federal law that would allow user-pay charging at interstate rest areas, the plan recommended.

And states should consider increasing weight limits for electric trucks, a step the federal government has already taken for trucks on interstate highways, the plan said.

“Current weight limitations can impact the payload capacity of battery-powered trucks, particularly long-haul freight trucks, because the additional weight of the battery system can result in reduced payload capacity,” the draft plan noted.

Comments on the draft plan will be accepted through April 25 and may be submitted through NESCAUM’s public input portal.

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Global Energy Forum Grapples with Ukraine Invasion, Renewable Future

The need for energy security in the wake of the war in Ukraine dominated the Atlantic Council’s 6th annual Global Energy Forum this week in Abu Dhabi as much as the threat of climate change.

Co-sponsored by the United Arab Emirates, the two-day conference drew more than 100 speakers, including energy analysts and venture capitalists from around the world, executives with gas turbine manufacturers, pipeline companies, oil and gas producers, hydrogen startups and government representatives.

European dependence on Russian hydrocarbons and the U.S. pledge to have more LNG shipped to Europe added urgency to the discussions about how to begin moving away from conventional oil and gas to renewables. Hydrogen was discussed as a fuel to augment rather than quickly replace fossil fuels.

Amos Hochstein, the U.S. State Department’s presidential coordinator, said Europe had begun this winter with low natural gas inventories because Russian state-owned Gazprom had reduced the amount of gas it exported for months before Russia invaded Ukraine. The Biden administration has announced at least 15 Bcf of additional LNG will be shipped to Europe this year, he said.

“We were able to work with market participants — U.S. companies, traders and buyers around the world — [to] redirect cargos … to Europe,” he said.

“You can’t magically bring on LNG infrastructure; you need to work with the system that you have,” he said. “There are some LNG export plants around the world that are not operating at full capacity. We are working to bring them into full capacity by increasing production on a temporary basis in those countries.”

Without saying so explicitly, Hochstein made it clear that more U.S. gas production will be needed, a development certain to infuriate environmentalists but encourage the industry, which has been reluctant to increase production because of past debt created by overproduction that drove down prices.

The price of gas contracts traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange for April closed Tuesday at $5.34/MMBTU. That was up from the March wholesale contract price of $4.57. Future monthly gas contracts through November trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed Wednesday in a range from $5.57 in May to $5.73 for November — an early warning for gas turbine plants and next winter’s heating bills.

“Europe is making some commitments that they will work with member states to ensure that there are long-term and contractual arrangements with U.S. infrastructure to allow for those facilities to be financed so that additional LNG can come on the market sooner,” Hochstein explained. “We are living in this strange world of energy transition, where we have to make sure that we have enough supplies of oil and gas today and over the next several years as we accelerate and double down on the energy transition itself, whether it’s through expansion of nuclear and including small modular reactors [SMRs] as well as other renewables and … clean energy technology that will reduce demand.”

Reducing demand for natural gas is a second leg of the strategy, Hochstein said. Even before the Ukrainian war, Europe had begun to diversify its energy sources, he said.

“There’s no doubt that is going to take time though. It’s not going to happen this year. And even by the end of the decade, we’re not going to see the biggest declines in demand. We have to plan for the short term, the medium term and the long term.

“We are looking to get away from the reliance on fossil fuels,” he added. “In the short term, we need to make sure that our system and our economy is well supplied to be able to sustain growth and to avoid the kind of inflationary actions that we’re seeing today in the market.

“But one thing is for sure, this war has totally and completely changed the narrative and how we view Russian supplies into Europe and the critical need to diversify away from Russian supplies into the future.

“That is a tall order, but it has to be done, and I don’t think there is more than one or maybe two countries in Europe that don’t fully understand this issue and commit themselves to this.”

Trillions of Dollars to Decarbonize 

Kara Mangone, director of climate strategy at Goldman Sachs said the firm estimates that funding the transition to renewables envisioned by the 2015 Paris Agreement will require $3 trillion to $5 trillion a year or $100 trillion to $150 trillion total.

“We’re nowhere near that today. About half of that capital will need to go into renewables and technologies that are at commercial scale today; but the other half, very importantly, will need to go into carbon capture; into hydrogen; into direct air capture; into sustainable aviation fuel and e-fuels.

“These are the fuels technologies that are not yet being adopted on a commercial scale because they have not hit the price point where that can happen for a lot of companies.”

Estimating that global business and industry is currently investing about a third of what Goldman thinks must be spent, Mangone said the new technologies should not be financed by pulling funding from traditional technologies. To remain commercially viable, industry “cannot pull out financing from the exact sectors: the oil and gas sector, metals and mining, real estate [and] agriculture,” she said.

Andre Pienaar, founder and CEO of C5, a venture capitalist company, said legacy nuclear is one of those older technologies that must be supported and that firms such as his should be investing in companies building SMRs.

Calling SMRs a “complete sea change,” Pienaar said advanced nuclear “has a very important contribution to make, to provide a secure and always-on source of fossil-free energy for the future to enable us to reach these goals.”

In an earlier event initiating the forum, Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and special envoy for climate change, also stressed that the transition to renewables and carbon-free synthetic fuels cannot happen overnight with little regard to existing technologies.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the theme for this year’s forum, the geopolitics of the energy transition, could not be more timely. We are all witnessing firsthand how sensitive energy markets are to geopolitical shocks,” Jaber said in opening remarks.

“The current volatility in oil prices is the result of a deeper underlying structural issue. Long-term underinvestment in oil and gas has left markets more exposed to risks of any kind, and wherever they take place.

“According to the [International Energy Agency], investment in oil and gas is $200 billion below where it needs to be. And that is just to keep up with demand through 2030. Near term, we’re also seeing markets tighten with demand up almost 3 million barrels over last year and expected to reach pre-pandemic levels by fourth quarter of this year.

“In short, the push to divest from hydrocarbons has met a stark reality, and we must accept and acknowledge that when we fully embrace the energy transition, we need to recognize that policies should be tailored to real-world scenarios.

“And they should follow the basic rule of progress: that if we fail to plan, our plan will definitely fail. Put simply, we cannot and must not unplug the current energy system before we have built the new one,” Jabar argued.

The Role of Hydrogen

Whether produced from natural gas or with renewable energy, or converted to a liquid such as ammonia or methanol, or shipped globally or moved through pipelines, hydrogen’s future role repeatedly emerged as a way to deal with climate concerns and at the same time address national energy security. (See Global Hydrogen Conference Reveals Plans to Ship Sunshine.)

Roger Martella (Atlantic Council) Content.jpgRoger Martella, GE | Atlantic Council

Hydrogen made from natural gas was also seen as a crucial and immediately available decarbonization tool, initially as a fuel for gas turbine power plants. The Biden administration has allocated $8 billion to help industry create at least four “hydrogen hubs,” two of which would be in regions rich in natural gas.

Roger Martella, chief sustainability officer for General Electric, said using hydrogen as a generation fuel for gas turbines just makes sense.

“We think of hydrogen as a breakthrough technology. And it is because it’s not really commercially feasible today. It’s something we’re investing in around the corner. But it’s also a unique breakthrough technology because it is, I’d say, technologically proven. We can run our turbines today on hydrogen. One hundred turbines have run for more than 8 million hours on hydrogen. Whether it’s blue hydrogen or green hydrogen, the technology exists to create it. We need to focus on the commercial feasibility of it,” he said.

“Our attitude is that all hydrogen is good hydrogen at this point. And what we’re hearing about infrastructure is key. Power generation seems to be the obvious [first] go-to place because it makes sense. We can run our turbines on hydrogen today; we can create power, and that’s an immediate decarbonization benefit,” he added.

Marco Alvera (Atlantic Council) Content.jpgSnam CEO Marco Alverà | Atlantic Council

Marco Alverà, CEO of Snam, Europe’s largest pipeline company, said 99% of the company’s pipeline system can move hydrogen today, but the company will start with blends until the demand for hydrogen develops. Snam plans to move hydrogen produced by renewable energy in northern Africa throughout Europe.

“The blending of methane and hydrogen is a good way to create the market, to create immediate demand, like we did for biofuels in Europe,” Alverà said.

Though he did not mention regulators, moving pure hydrogen in pipelines is not currently permitted in Europe but regulators will have to address the issue because pipelines are the least-cost way of moving gas.

“The cheapest way to move any gas is via pipe,” he added, possibly in a reference to plans by Canadian, Japanese and Australian companies and at least one U.S. hydrogen startup to convert hydrogen into liquid ammonia, methanol or a similar liquid chemical and ship it in ocean-going tankers to Europe, Japan and South Korea.

This will take years and trillions of dollars of investment.

“It’s the same with natural gas, and it will be the same with hydrogen,” Alverà said of the slow transition. “There will be different uses for hydrogen, whether it goes into a synthetic fuel like diesel, whether it goes into ammonia, whether it goes into methanol.

“Where it has to replace coal and natural gas for baseload energy in industry, it will be impossible to beat the cost competitiveness of pipelines,” he said.

Regina Mayor, head of energy and natural resources at the global accounting firm KPMG, warned that investment in innovative technologies will be constrained until accounting firms can figure out how to count carbon emissions emitted by current fuels.

She said a surprising number of energy investment analysts “don’t even understand that the basic carbon reporting that we see today [is] based on algorithms, measurements, extrapolations.

“The accounting firms really have to figure out how we [can] start counting carbon emissions in the same way that we count currency down to detailed levels. And only then I think, will we have the level of transparency to reduce emissions that we need to [in order for] the investor community to be confident in what we’re doing,” she said. 

Charles Hendry (Atlantic Council) Content.jpgCharles Hendry, former UK energy minister | Atlantic Council

That lack of detail puts corporations pressured by investor activists in a quandary, said Charles Hendry, former U.K. energy minister.

“I think investors are becoming much more critical in this area. If you look at the way that they’ve turned their backs on coal, it is very hard to find public investment into coal now. And oil and gas run the risk of moving in the same direction,” he said. “And publicly quoted [traded] companies, they have got to face shareholder activism.

“And if they are not moving in the right direction, if they are not investing heavily in low-carbon technologies in the way that BP and Shell are, if they’re not tackling their methane emissions, if they’re not looking at how they advance carbon capture, they will then be marked down and will find it much more difficult to get there,” he said.

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EPSA Members Renew Call for Carbon Price; See Long ‘Bridge’ for Gas

WASHINGTON — Competitive power generators on Tuesday renewed their calls for a national price on carbon emissions while complaining of a lack of market support for the flexible gas-fired generation they say will be needed to supplement renewables for the foreseeable future.

Top officials from Calpine, LS Power, Vistra (NYSE:VST), Competitive Power Ventures and Tenaska delivered their views at the Electric Power Supply Association’s Competitive Power Summit at the National Press Club, where some of their concerns were echoed by a panel of Ph.D.s and the CEOs of NERC, PJM and ISO-NE.

“I think it’s worth saying one more time: national carbon price. It’s such a no-brainer,” said Sherman Knight, president and chief commercial officer for Competitive Power Ventures. “It’s straightforward. It is efficient, and it gets it gets the job done.”

“I don’t know why we continue to have this debate about what’s the most direct way [to accomplish decarbonization]; what’s the most … even playing field; what seems to be administratively easy to do,” agreed Curt Morgan, CEO of Vistra. “And for the life of me, I’ve met with a lot of people on Capitol Hill — many you guys probably have too — and I still can’t quite get my head around why we can’t get something like a carbon price. [It’s] baffling, I think, to all of us. There is movement though; I will say I’m not as pessimistic as I was a year ago.”

“If we don’t put that price of carbon on the system, I don’t see how anything could work,” Harvard economist William Hogan said in the last session of the daylong conference. “We’re doomed to fail. So I’m very pessimistic about it.”

“I agree with everything that Bill just said,” economist Paul Sotkiewicz, president of E-Cubed Policy Associates, joked in response. “In fact, now I’m so depressed, I’m going to bring my hair dryer into my shower.”

A More Expensive Transition

“The energy transition is going to be expensive. … And it’s going to be far more expensive if we go around choosing pet projects here, here and here,” Knight said. “We feel like we’re chasing state mandates, as opposed to focusing on reliability and reducing carbon in the industry. And that gets a little bit frustrating. … We can do it, you know, but certainly it’s less effective [than] if there was a federal, or even just a regional — within an RTO — consistent, policy.”

ISO-NE CEO Gordon van Welie cited a study by the RTO that predicted the region could face negative LMPs within a decade that would “wreck the markets.”

“As the states grapple with that reality, I think there’s some empathy starting to develop towards having to put a carbon price into the electricity markets. It’s probably not the right place to do it; the right place to do it is in [the economy-wide Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative] or some national scheme. But both of those are not really politically feasible at this point. So the next best [place] is to put it into the ISO markets. And we’re going to need to have the states tell us what number they want.”

“It pains me to say it, but I think there is value in some incrementalism, mostly because we have no other option,” said Arnie Quinn, vice president of FERC-jurisdictional markets for Vistra. He added that his company would also support a forward clean energy market like that under discussion in ISO-NE. (See Draft Study Weighs Tradeoffs of CO2 Pricing, FCEM for ISO-NE.)

“Incremental carbon pricing is better than none,” agreed PJM Independent Market Monitor Joe Bowring, who noted RGGI has had a “demonstrable impact” on system dispatch in PJM despite the fact that only four PJM states currently belong to RGGI.

The RGGI model allows states full control over the carbon quantity and price variables. The results of those state decisions change the marginal costs of generators in the PJM market, and the impacts flow through the normal market dynamics without the RTO having to make any policy decisions about carbon.

“There has to be more state cooperation — whether it’s in the form of a carbon price, or in recognizing the value of transmission — to help meet state renewable energy and other goals along with resource adequacy,” said John Moore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Sustainable FERC Project.

Travis Fisher, president of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council (ELCON), said state targets “that say you have to get to this place 30 years from now [is] a very expensive way to do it.”

Instead, policymakers should say, “‘We are going to minimize the cost of the entire system — generation, transmission, all parts of it — we’re going to minimize the cost of it, subject to all the other policy constraints.’ … It’s got to be reliability, at least cost.”

The Length of the Natural Gas ‘Bridge’

The role of natural gas also was a recurrent theme in the discussions, with NERC CEO Jim Robb and PJM CEO Manu Asthana joining generators in insisting that natural gas will be needed to supplement intermittent resources and ensure reliability.

“In a world where policymakers don’t want gas — gas has become the new coal in many areas — what do we think is going to provide that balancing capability?” Robb asked. “It could be hydrogen, but that’s a long, long way away. It could be batteries, but we don’t have a battery technology that can perform cost-effectively at the scale we would need it to with the durations that we would need. It could be small nuclear reactors [with] flexible characteristics. But that’s a long, long way off.”

Robb said he agreed with those who see natural gas as a “bridge” to a low-carbon future. What “terrifies me in this transition [is] a lot of people think that the bridge is about this long,” he added, spreading his hands a few inches apart. “And I think most people in this [conference] room would say this bridge extends from that wall to that wall. Your point of view on the length of that bridge dictates an awful lot as to what you do in terms of investing in infrastructure.”

The inability to invest in gas infrastructure or electric transmission, Robb said, “is really going to cripple our ability to meet any of the emission-reduction targets that we have.”

“I think it is a long bridge,” Asthana responded. “In fact, PJM is on the record as saying that we think we need access to our thermal generation until and unless there’s replacements of assets in place.”

Devin Hartman, energy and environmental policy director for R Street Institute, said NERC and others need to address a “reliability and cost education problem.”

“There are folks — a sizable population — that genuinely believe that we can just force all natural gas off the system nationwide [in] this decade, replace it with renewables, and costs will go down and reliability will be maintained,” he said. “We have a stronger role to play in educating policymakers and others in understanding these mechanisms. How do markets drive [generator] entry and exit? How do they manage risk?”

Where’s the Market Support?

Asthana said capacity markets may be increasingly important in providing incentives to gas generators as energy markets respond to renewables with zero marginal costs. “And you know, maybe there’s an answer in the form of other ancillary services that we procure for ramping or some other form of flexibility.”

Generators said that while they continue to support competitive markets, they are not providing price signals for new gas units.

Vistra’s Morgan said the industry is “at a crossroads,” with reliability at stake.

“I may be the boy that cried wolf, but that’s OK. I’m telling you … there is a big disconnect in places like PJM and in places like ISO New England if we don’t do something about this,” he said. “We’ve got to have an analysis done that figures out that marginal resource that is necessary, under the most extreme circumstance, with the intermittent resources out, that will ensure reliability. And the ISOs have to be the ones to step up and do this because they’re the objective person. [If] we come to the table, people say, ‘Oh, they’re those greedy generators, or ‘they’re just talking their book again.’

“I don’t know how to build a gas plant today, in a competitive market, with not knowing how long it’s going to be around,” he continued. “I don’t know how you can say that $50/MW-day, or $2 or less a kilowatt-month on a capacity clear supports new build of a gas plant. … Look, competitive markets have brought better reliability, lower costs. … But we’ve got a lot of hands in these markets, and a lot of forces are [attempting] to drive lower and lower capacity” prices.

CPV’s Knight agreed that “price signals do not currently support investment in new dispatchable generation in most of the country.”

“I think that what we have to be careful about is saying competitive markets aren’t incentivizing investment. And I think that is absolutely not true. I think what we’re talking about here is tweaking the competitive markets … as the infrastructure transition occurs … so that it can unleash the power of private capital to come in and make investments — or not have private companies preserve capital by retiring perfectly good assets that are needed for the transition.”

Generators said the move to effective load-carrying capability should help the most flexible gas units.

“If it takes you 24 hours to start up, that’s not that useful to the grid with intermittent resources,” Morgan said. “So combined cycle plants that have much more flexibility ought to have a higher effectiveness rating than … a gas steamer that takes 24 hours to start up. … We can’t just come in always pushing our own [generation]. We have to admit that some of our dispatchable resources are less effective.”