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November 8, 2024

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Clean Energy, Equity Goals to Reshape Oregon IRP Process

States grappling with how to incorporate ambitious clean energy and social equity goals into utility resource planning might do well to keep tabs on a proceeding that Oregon regulators kicked off Wednesday.

The Oregon Public Utility Commission launched the effort (UM 2225) in response last year’s passage of House Bill 2021, which set the most aggressive clean energy standard in the country. The law directs Oregon’s investor-owned utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2030, on the path to achieving 100% GHG-free generation by 2040. (See West Coast Could be Net Zero by Midcentury.)

HB 2021 also calls for utility decarbonization strategies to provide economic benefits to residents while preventing any burdens from falling disproportionately on communities of color, low-income and rural communities, and tribes.

One provision of HB 2021 requires that, “to the maximum extent possible,” the move to emissions-free electricity create “meaningful living wage jobs,” promote “workforce equity,” and increase “energy security and resiliency.” Another calls for utilities to examine the “costs and opportunities” of procuring electricity from community-based renewable energy resources intended to contribute to local economic development and resiliency.

The law stipulates that all those objectives be reflected in utilities’ clean energy plans (CEPs), which must be “based on or included in” their integrated resource plans (IRPs), submitted every two years for approval by the PUC.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the commission acknowledged the open-ended nature of its “investigation” into how it will integrate HB 2021 goals into its existing utility planning and procurement processes — and how the law will likely alter those processes.

“[HB 2021] makes GHG reductions a clear driver [of planning and procurement] and asks us to unpack and capture community benefits, and it prioritizes equity for those who participate in the transition and who shoulder its costs,” PUC Chair Megan Decker said.

“The only way for us to implement such a big and broad vision — full of new concepts — successfully will be to adopt a learning orientation, to recognize that we’ll be iterating, taking up some things and saving others for later, making decisions, evaluating what worked and adjusting,” Decker said.

The PUC chair said she foresees a “lengthy period of evolution” for developing the new planning framework.

“IRPs are not built in a day, and CEPs are even harder with all of the integration of other planning processes that have emerged and new issues that are introduced,” she said.

“I appreciate the framing of both the continuous learning mindset that we will have to adopt here and the scale of the evolution in regulation that is envisioned by this whole package of legislation, and the need for it all to integrate and work with each other,” Commissioner Letha Tawney said.

Increasing Complexity

Caroline Moore, administrator of the PUC’s Strategy and Integration Division, said the commission’s most pressing objective is to provide utilities with the “near-term” guidance needed to craft their first CEPs, likely to be filed in March 2023 along with updated IRPs.

“That’s why we’re being really intentional about this scoping effort and trying to tease out what is critical to establish now [and] what’s the best way to establish it,” Moore said.

There are two immediate questions “at play” in the proceeding, Moore said. The first revolves around how to incorporate CEP requirements into current processes, while the second delves into how the commission can streamline those processes to help utilities meet the fast-approaching deadlines for their clean energy targets. The commission hopes to have more clarity on those issues by the end of the third quarter of this year, she said.

Elaine Hart, a consultant the commission hired to survey Oregon IRP stakeholders (including utilities, consumer advocates, local governments and community groups) on PUC processes, said many survey respondents expressed concern that CEPs will increase the technical complexity of questions already being dealt with in the planning process.

“It’s hard to plan for a low-carbon system, and it’s hard to plan with the geographical granularity that you need to make decisions that are informed by community input that are meaningful,” Hart said. “These are technically challenging problems, and they don’t always nicely fit into the buckets that our existing processes provide in terms of information analysis and decision making.”

Hart said that while survey respondents lauded Oregon’s planning process for the ability to influence utilities, IRP engagement is “typically limited” to a “relatively small number” of stakeholders.

“So, the question of whether the utility has provided adequate opportunity for public input across the IRP, the [distribution system planning] and the CEP may look different in an HB 2021 world, where there’s a greater emphasis on local impacts,” Hart said.

Comments from the Field

During Wednesday’s virtual meeting, participants commenting in the “chat” area of the meeting screen provided an indication of what some stakeholders hope to see in a planning process reshaped by HB 2021.

Heide Caswell of PacifiCorp and Nidhi Thakar of Portland General Electric (NYSE:POR) both expressed hope that the commission will integrate the CEP process with its distribution system planning process.

Norm Cimon, a founding member of Oregon Rural Action, wrote that his group’s “key issue” is how the residents in the 25% of the state “where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest — can be full participants in the transition to an economy powered by distributed generation of renewable energy.”

Max Greene, regulatory and policy director at Renewable Northwest, said his organization wants “to establish a process that honors HB 2021’s equity considerations and gets us on a path to a zero-emissions grid ‘as soon as practicable’ and no later than the act’s binding GHG targets.”

Oregon Solar + Storage Industries Association Executive Director Angela Crowley-Koch said she agreed with Greene’s comment and “also would like to see community resilience included in plans, not just grid resilience. This includes incorporating the goals of HB 2021 to create economic development opportunities for Oregonians with projects built here.”

“We would like see how to make the clean energy plans meaningful and make sure that they work in tandem with the current planning processes in Oregon and the region rather [than] a separate process,” Irion Sanger wrote on behalf of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition. “We are interested in seeing how the CEP will also ensure that the procurement process allows for diverse ownership of renewable energy sources.”

For all the complexity it introduces into Oregon’s IRP process, HB 2021 may have just accelerated the inevitable, said Tawney.

“I think in some ways, our IRP processes have been straining a bit there at the seams to try to cope with the way the grid is changing, and the way customer preferences are changing — and on and on,” she said.

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Overheard: NECA Asks Experts ‘What to Do with All This CO2’

In the global effort to reduce greenhouse gases, companies are advancing technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide emissions as a viable way to decarbonize energy.

On Wednesday, the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s Fuels Committee invited experts to explore the current carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) market and its place in the global decarbonization effort.

Here’s a look at some of the experts’ insights from that panel discussion.

CCS vs. Alternatives

Understanding the current role of CCS for climate and energy requires looking at the technological alternatives, according to panel moderator Michael Stern, a chemical engineer at consulting firm Exponent.

Renewable energy, he said, is an “obvious” alternative that has its “merits” and “limitations.”

The reliability of clean generation resources could become uncertain as the effects of climate change worsen, Stern said. Energy storage as a means of balancing uncertain renewable output also has limitations, he added.

There are mature programs that allow companies to compensate for emissions through the purchase of offsets, but they are “not without significant challenges,” Stern said. Some people are concerned that such programs, which include forest carbon offsets, for example, overestimate the amount of CO2 that is stored and the lifetime of that storage.

Direct air capture (DAC), which pulls CO2 from the air, has a measure of flexibility that is not available with CCS, Stern said. CCS grabs CO2 at the source of the emission, so it must be transported, potentially over long distances, to a storage location or secondary market.

A DAC developer, on the other hand, can site a plant near a renewable energy facility to access clean power or near a geological formation for storage. But Stern said that air is a “very dilute source of CO2” compared with point-source emissions, making the economics of DAC more challenging.

Advanced Tech

Cryogenic carbon capture (CCC) is at the leading edge of CCS, providing a path forward for the market that improves cost and efficiency, according to Sustainable Energy Solutions cofounder Larry Baxter.

Sustainable Energy started out commercializing CCC a decade ago, and Chart Industries purchased the company last year. The company is demonstrating the technology around the world with a variety of CO2 sources, Baxter said.

CCC has many applications, such as energy storage and hydrogen production, but Baxter said it is “a game-changing carbon-capture technology.”

The CCC system takes flue gas from any source to produce a liquid CO2 product for sequestration or use downstream. In the cryogenic process, CO2 cools down and forms a solid.

“We separate the solid from the gas and warm everything back up again,” Baxter said. The solid, he added, is pressurized before it warms up so it can form a liquid CO2 as it melts.

That process is not like traditional refrigeration that results in a cold product. “We just use the cold as part of the separation technology,” Baxter said.

One benefit of the CCC system is that it does not require any modification at the point source, Baxter said.

“We think it’s probably the easiest retrofit carbon capture technology we know of, as it requires literally no change of systems upstream,” he said.

It also produces high-purity CO2, potentially meeting beverage-grade standards, which Baxter said are the highest for CO2 purity.

Large-scale CCS

Enbridge (NYSE: ENB), one of the largest pipeline infrastructure companies in North America, is collaborating with companies to develop integrated solutions for CO2 capture, transportation and storage.

Enbridge is working with Capital Power and Lehigh Cement on the Wabamun Carbon Hub Project in Alberta, Canada. That project, according to Enbridge, will be one of the largest integrated CCS projects in the world, potentially avoiding 4 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

Alberta has good geology for CO2 storage, according to Freddy Sanches, technical manager of market innovation at Enbridge. Having nearby underground pore space where CO2 can be injected “helps with the economics,” he said.

Enbridge is studying geological formations for CO2 storage capacity in Ontario, Canada, and in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Midwest.

“We’re trying to de-risk the geology and learn more about it to see if it’s suitable for CO2 storage because that’s one of the biggest unknowns,” he said.

On the storage front, Enbridge is also studying its gas storage facilities to see if they are suitable for conversion to CO2 storage.

“We’re not converting any of those storage facilities yet, as we still need them for natural gas production, but that is something that we are looking into,” he said.

CCS in Canada

The International CCS Knowledge Center in Canada has reported that the Western Canadian sedimentary basin, which is the epicenter of oil and gas supply in Western Canada, has the largest potential for storage, according to Mark Demchuk, national director of strategy and stakeholder relations for the center.

Canada has almost 400 gigatons of storage capacity, primarily centered in that Western basin, Demchuk said. The Northeast U.S., he added, has similar geologic characteristics for large-scale storage capacity, primarily in the Appalachian and Michigan basins.

De-risking large CCS projects and improving the business case for projects to move forward is a “hot topic” in Canada, Demchuk said. A large-scale project that stores a million metric tons of CO2 per year might cost in the range of $1 billion, depending on the site or industry. For Canada to meet its 2030 CO2 emission reduction target, he said, the country would need a minimum of 15 projects at that scale and cost.

There is no positive investment case for those projects at this time, Demchuk said.

“All levels of government … and all the companies involved recognize that we need to develop the components to support an investable business case if those projects are actually going to happen in the time frame we’re talking about,” he said.

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ISO-NE Lists New Projects for 2022 in Budget Report

ISO-NE’s plans for new capital projects this year include infrastructure upgrades for the Next Generation Markets (NEM) platform, enhancements to its weather forecasts and a switch away from the nearly obsolete Internet Explorer browser.

The grid operator laid out changes in its plan for 2022 in a budget report filed with FERC on Thursday.

It spent $27.5 million on capital projects in 2021, $500,000 under budget in part because of FERC’s rejection of the Energy Security Improvements plan and a deferred cybersecurity improvement project.

Its biggest new capital expense for 2022, about $4.5 million, is Phase II of a project designed to prepare the RTO’s hardware and software for the new market clearing engine that General Electric is developing as part of the NEM project. The RTO is also purchasing a cloud-based cybersecurity package for protecting enterprise applications and resources.

Also added to the budget for this year is enhancements to ISO-NE’s weather forecasting. The project will expand its forecasts from eight to 23 cities in New England and add new weather concepts to try to improve its load forecasts, the document says.

Some of the other new budget items include improvements to the RTO’s Solar Do-Not-Exceed dispatch processes; a new physical security system to replace obsolete cameras at control centers; and a move to cut down the number of internet browsers ISO-NE uses from four to two, timed to coincide with Microsoft cutting off support for Internet Explorer this June.

In other changes to the 2022, budget ISO-NE will save $1.5 million because of its decision to delay elimination of the minimum offer price rule and $400,000 because of a delayed project to migrate its public website from internal servers to the cloud.

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Texas RE: Malware, Ransomware Attacks ‘Here to Stay’

Cyberattacks for economic gain are “without a doubt” going to remain a danger for businesses for some time, the Texas Reliability Entity told its members Thursday.

Jason Moehlman, the organization’s manager of internal cybersecurity and compliance, said during a Talk with Texas RE webinar that bad actors behind malware and ransomware attacks have little to lose and everything to gain.

“A lot of the attackers are basically countries not necessarily friendly to the U.S.,” he said. “There’s no real motivation for them to shut down those criminal organizations or they are actually groups working for that state. And with what we’ve seen, many companies are willing to pay that ransom, so we’re probably going to be dealing with these types of attacks for years to come.”

The attacks are designed to eliminate computer systems by either completely destroying them (malware) or by rendering them unusable until a ransom is paid (ransomware), Moehlman said. Whereas malware is less common and most often used by nation states for political motivations, he said, ransomware is deployed by criminal organizations to make money.

And the attacks could become more political and even more “battlefield oriented.” Moehlman pointed to rising tensions in Eastern Europe, where Russian troops are poised on Ukraine’s border. Just last month, businesses in the former Soviet republic were hit with the WhisperGate malware. Russian hackers are thought to have been behind a pair of attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2017. (See Six Russians Charged for Ukraine Cyberattacks.)

“We may actually see cyber deployed as a weapon in an actual conflict on a very wide scale for the first time,” Moehlman said. “Everyone’s a little nervous about what’s going to happen there. So, I do think we need to make sure we’re putting a little more emphasis on securing your environments to the best of our ability.”

He said last month’s attack used malware that presented itself as ransomware, but there was no way to recover the system.

“It overwrites the master boot records of those systems. That seems to be the playbook for this type of malware,” Moehlman said.

A company’s defenses against malware or ransomware is going to be the same, he said, because 95% of the malware is written for Microsoft Windows.

“It’s probably what most of us are using in our IT environments. Put your focus there,” Moehlman said.

He listed four foundational responsibilities within the IT environment, primarily for preventing and recovering from malware attacks:

  • have someone responsible for inventorying the IT environment;
  • timely application of patches beyond Microsoft programs;
  • logging Windows events and traffic; and
  • using a 3-2-1 backup strategy (three copies of data: two different types of media like disks, tapes or the cloud, and one backup off-site).

“Put some effort into managing them,” Moehlman said. “One, it’s going to reduce your attack surface when it comes to destructive attacks. And secondly, it’s going to improve your ability to recover your environment should that worst-case scenario happen.”

Interestingly, he said one security weakness comes from Big Tech itself.

“It’s the Microsofts, the Googles, the Apples and all the other software vendors out there that are telling the world what’s wrong with their product, usually once a month,” Moehlman said. “There’s a lot of smart people with a lot of resources and money behind them taking those updates, reverse engineering and building exploits that can be used in a relatively short time frame of weeks or months.”

Moehlman also offered defense measures, such as layered security controls with policies and procedures and employee awareness and training; restricting physical access; and hardening protection for networks, devices, applications and data.

“Do you have those basic policies and procedures in place that are designed to limit threat external actors between your environment? And are you implementing those?” he asked, rhetorically.

“It’s always a good idea to review those policies on a frequent basis. Make sure you actually adhering to them,” Moehlman said. “Hopefully, I’m preaching to the choir.”

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States to Get $615 Million for EV Charging from IIJA Funds

WASHINGTON — Puerto Rico will get $2 million in federal funds to install electric vehicle chargers on highways across the island; Texas will get a whopping $60 million.

Those two figures are, respectively, the low and high ends of the individual allocations from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) EV infrastructure funds, announced jointly by the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy on Thursday.

The states, Puerto Rico and D.C. will receive $615 million for 2022, the first installment of the $5 billion the IIJA will send over the next five years under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program. To receive the funds, each state will have to submit an EV infrastructure plan detailing how it will use the money. A program guidance document, outlining plan requirements, was also issued on Thursday.

“We know that EVs are the way of the future,” said Andrew Wishnia, the DOT’s deputy assistant secretary for climate policy, speaking virtually to a roomful of more than 100 state energy officials at 2022 Energy Policy Outlook Conference of the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). “The auto industry is already making huge strides and moving the industry in this direction, but we need to ensure three things. One, the shift will happen quickly enough to make a meaningful difference in the fight against the climate crisis; two, that EVs and EV chargers are made in America by American workers, and three, that they’ll be available and accessible enough for every American driver to reap the benefits.”

DOE, NASEO and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) are also working on a memorandum of understanding on helping states develop their plans and deploy chargers, Wishnia said.

Although not yet finalized, he said the MOU will take advantage of “AASHTO’s and NASEO’s ability to convene state departments of transportation and state energy offices to leverage collaboration, foster lessons learned and best practices and further the likelihood of a successful and seamless national EV charging network.”

The goal for NEVI is to ensure deployment of EV chargers along highways and other major transportation routes so that “drivers in cities large and small, towns and rural communities, [can] take advantage of the benefits of driving electric,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a press release announcing the allocations.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the NEVI program “will help us win the EV race by working with states, labor, and the private sector to deploy a historic nationwide charging network that will make EV charging accessible for more Americans.”

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) will review the state plans, which are due  Aug. 1. The FHWA will determine whether plans are approved by Sept. 30, according to a memo and guidance document.

“Because NEVI formula program funds are directed to designated Alternative Fuel Corridors to build out a convenient, reliable, affordable and equitable public charging network, states should first prioritize investments along the interstate highway system,” the memo says.

“The federal share payable for the cost of a project funded under the NEVI formula program is 80%,” according to FWHA’s notice of the allocations.

The Top 10 States

The $1.2 trillion IIJA provides a total of $7.5 billion for EV infrastructure. The $5-billion NEVI program allocates funds to each state based on a formula, while another $2.5 billion will go to competitive grants for smaller towns or tribes that may not qualify for the NEVI funds.

Providing an overview of the guidance document, Wishnia said that it “focuses on providing information on the strategic deployment of EV chargers on interstate and designated highway corridors, while also establishing technical guidance” on where stations should be located and their charging capacity. More detailed information on minimum standards and requirements for EV chargers will be issued later this year, he said.

The formula used for the allocations is based on the formula used for federal highway programs. Those allocations ensure each state receives 95 cents on the dollar for the taxes their residents pay into the federal Highway Trust Fund via taxes on gasoline and diesel.

While each state could receive millions in 2022, the top 10 states will be receiving almost 48% of the funds. In addition to Texas, the top states are California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan and South Carolina.

According to the guidance document, states that do not submit plans or whose plans are not approved, can have their funding redirected to competitive grants for individual cities or other local jurisdictions. States with unapproved plans will have an opportunity to work with the FHWA to revise them.

Good Jobs and Clean Environment

Reactions from clean energy groups focused largely on the economic impact and the jobs the funding will produce.

Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a labor-environmental organization, called Thursday’s announcement “a big deal.”

“The new NEVI program makes exactly the kind of investments that prove we can have both good jobs and a clean environment when we center and uplift the workers who make the transition to cleaner transportation possible, and the communities most impacted by climate change and the poor transportation policies of the past.”

Andrew Reagan, executive director of Clean Energy for America, an advocacy group representing the clean energy workforce, also applauded the announcement. “Investments like this ensure more Americans in more parts of the country can enjoy the benefits of the clean energy transition more quickly,” he said. “And over 3 million American clean energy workers are ready, willing and able to make that happen.”

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NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Feb. 10, 2022

Trustees Re-elected; Leadership Shuffle at MRC, Board Committees

Thursday’s meeting of NERC’s Member Representatives Committee (MRC) and Board of Trustees saw some changeover in the organization’s leadership, as board Chair Ken DeFontes sought “to get some fresh eyes in front of things.”

First, outgoing MRC Chair Paul Choudhury of BC Hydro handed over his gavel to Roy Jones, CEO of ElectriCities; Evergy’s Jennifer Flandermeyer succeeded Jones as vice chair. Jones and Flandermeyer were elected at the MRC’s previous meeting in November. (See “Jones, Flandermeyer Picked to Head MRC,” NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Nov. 4, 2021.)

MRC members then unanimously approved the re-election of Trustees Jane Allen, Bob Clarke and Colleen Sidford — along with DeFontes — for additional three-year terms each. The four were chosen in what Nominating Committee Chair Roy Thilly jokingly described as “an easy process”; Jones congratulated the four following the vote, which he called “a vote of confidence that you all are doing a fantastic job.”

In the subsequent board meeting, DeFontes sought and gained trustees’ approval to elevate George Hawkins to vice chair, replacing Clarke, who took the post last February. (See NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Feb. 4, 2021.)

The move was part of a larger proposed leadership shuffle among the board’s committees: Suzanne Keenan will replace Hawkins as Chair of the Corporate Governance and Human Resources Committee, while Clarke will take over the Nominating Committee from Thilly. The Technology and Security Committee, currently helmed by Keenan, will be taken over by Jane Allen, and Clarke’s chairmanship of the Finance and Audit Committee will be taken by Jim Piro. The board approved all of these moves as well.

Rob Manning and Colleen Sidford will remain as chairs of the Compliance Committee and Enterprise-wide Risk Committee, respectively.

DeFontes described the committee changes as a way to “facilitate [the] development” of the committees. He called Hawkins’ move to vice chair part of his goal of “using the vice chair role in a lot more strategic way than we have in the past”; DeFontes also later asked the board to raise the vice chair’s stipend to $10,000, the same as committee chairs, in light of “the impact and the work that’s involved” in the role, which was also approved.

Finally, NERC CEO Jim Robb presented NERC’s slate of officers to the board for approval, noting two changes: Bryan Preston, who joined the organization in September as vice president of people and culture; and Kimberly Mielcarek, NERC’s senior director of communications, who was elevated to vice president. These updates were approved as well.

Additional Approvals

The trustees went on to approve work plans for 2022 for NERC’s Standards Committee, Compliance and Certification Committee, and the Personnel Certification Governance Committee, along with changes to the Standards Committee’s charter that “clarify the role of the [committee] as a process oversight body … [and] that the [committee] may consult technical committees regarding the technical justification of standard authorization requests.” The updates also more directly specify the committee’s ability to “address urgent reliability needs with appropriate agility.”

The board also approved proposed reliability standard CIP-014-3 (Physical security) for submission to FERC. The new standard updates CIP-014-2 to reflect the introduction of the ERO Enterprise Secure Evidence Locker, which made obsolete some of the standard’s language regarding storage of “evidence for demonstrating compliance” with the standard.

Face-to-face Meetings to Return in May

While NERC’s plan to resume in-person board meetings in February had to be suspended because of the surge in COVID-19 cases in December and January, DeFontes said Thursday that the organization remains focused on bringing back face-to-face gatherings.

“We’re coming to a point with the pandemic where things are starting to calm down a bit post-Omicron,” DeFontes told the MRC, referring to the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19 that fueled the past few months’ high case numbers. “I’d really like to have the May meeting be a [fully] attended meeting. … Hopefully by then there won’t be any problem with people’s ability to travel.”

NERC had originally intended to ease the transition back to a normal meeting schedule by holding the first meeting of the year in Atlanta with a hybrid format, in which only board and MRC members would meet in person and all others would join via teleconference.

However, with May’s meeting scheduled to be held in D.C., DeFontes acknowledged that setting up the audio and visual equipment would be “a little bit more complicated … when we’re doing it at a hotel.” He encouraged members to “make an effort to come and get back together” for their first face-to-face gathering since the board’s February 2020 meeting in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

The rest of the year’s meeting schedule has not been finalized, but DeFontes said the board plans to hold its August meeting in person in Vancouver, Canada; November’s meeting will likely be held in New Orleans.

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Federal Officials Urge States to Prep for Millions in Infrastructure Funds

WASHINGTON — State and federal officials told the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO)’s Energy Policy Outlook Conference on Wednesday they are laser-focused on the millions of dollars that will soon be going to states from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and making sure that money has real impacts on people’s lives.

“If we align our federal resources and our state actions, we can actually deliver meaningful, real on-the-ground change that will be lasting, and that’s what we’re all hanging out in public service to do,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy told more than 100 state officials and others in a ballroom at The Fairmont hotel in Georgetown.

“Let’s think about and talk about how we really focus attention in our states, in our communities, on how many jobs and how much economic opportunity that these investments will deliver,” McCarthy said. ”We are not asking for sacrifice. We are asking for government to serve its people and serve [them] well. … Let’s talk about this as meaningful to every human being. That’s the best way that we’re going to move forward.”

McCarthy’s speech capped a morning during which a range of officials from the Department of Energy (DOE) spoke — most virtually — about the money that will be available to the states from what they called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). Signed in November, the $1.2-trillion package includes $62 billion in energy funding.

Gina McCarthy 2022-02-09 (RTO Insider LLC) FI.jpgGina McCarthy, White House National Climate Advisor | © RTO Insider LLC

Officials urged states to prepare by appointing a coordinator to work across the different agencies that may be applying for funding or implementing programs. The need to get the money out to the states as quickly and efficiently as possible was another recurrent theme. Speaking in Tennessee on Tuesday, President Biden said the state allocations for the $5 billion in BIL funding to support EV charging are expected in the coming days.

At the NASEO conference, Kelly Speakes-Backman, who leads the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, provided a detailed breakdown of how the $550 million in Energy Efficiency and Conservation block grants will be distributed.

The BIL expands the block grant program so these federal dollars can be used to “include programs for financing, purchasing and installing energy efficiency, renewable energy and zero-emission transportation measures,” Speakes-Backman said. The formula for individual state allocations is still being worked out, she said, but “states are required to distribute at least 50% of their funds to units of local governments in their state that are not otherwise eligible for those [funds],” she said.

Another 2% of the funds are carved out for competitive grants to “eligible entities” — local governments and tribes — that cannot qualify for the state block grants, she said.

The $500 million for state energy plans requires each state to include “transmission and distribution planning,” Speakes-Backman said. “It adds an optional element for demand response. It clarifies [the] eligibility of electrified transportation, and it requires that state energy security management” is part of state plans.

Speakes-Backman stressed the DOE’s commitment to working with the states, noting that a recent “listening session” on the federal funding drew about 300 state officials and other stakeholders, and she promised additional meetings to gather state input.

Patricia Hoffman, acting assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Electricity, talked about the BIL funding for transmission, distribution and storage. The law includes $5 billion for transmission resilience and grid-hardening projects and another $5 billion for innovative storage and distribution projects, she said.

The resilience funding will be split between states and utilities, Hoffman said. “The goal of that is really to drive investments, and that is going to be focused around strategic goals with the states and what are the priorities that we want to invest [in],” she said.

The funding also includes a carve-out for small utilities, she said.

The $5 billion for storage and distribution projects will target riskier projects that will drive technology advancements, Hoffman said. The money will go to the states, and “the states really will partner with the public and rural electric cooperatives and other entities for innovative tech progress,” she said.

Not Giving up on Build Back Better

The focus on small communities and small utilities that might not normally be able to access federal funds reflects the Biden administration’s commitment to environmental justice (EJ), which McCarthy urged state officials to place at the center of their BIL-funded programs.

“We want to make sure that federal programs deliver at least 40% of the benefits to disadvantaged communities,” she said, noting that an EJ screening tool will soon be available to help the states develop these programs.

Nick Akins Patricia Collawn (The White House) FI.jpgPNM Resources CEO Patricia Collawn (right) speaks as American Electric Power CEO Nick Akins listens during a White House meeting with President Biden on the Build Back Better bill Wednesday. | The White House

“We’re going to work together to make sure that our money goes where it needs to go … and really make sure that we’re showing the impacts of these resources every step of the way,” she said.  

McCarthy also urged state officials not to give up on the stalled Build Back Better bill, which contains $555 billion in energy funding.

“We need to work together to get this Build Back Better over the finish line because we have no choice,” McCarthy said. “We will not succeed unless the United States of America invests in our own infrastructure. It’s not good enough to just put a half a buck in; we need to put in a buck and a half.”

Biden made his own plug for the BBB Wednesday in a meeting with utility CEOs, including American Electric Power’s Nick Akins and Duke Energy’s Lynne Good, who said the bill’s tax credits for renewables and energy storage would aid their transition to a low-carbon grid.

“This legislation is going to allow us to be carbon-free sooner, gives us renewable portfolio standards [and] allows us to securitize to keep costs down for customers,” said PNM Resources CEO Patricia Collawn. 

She also praised the bill’s support for “a just transition,” citing funding for coal miners’ severance and retraining. “It has money for economic development in there to revitalize [tribal] communities,” she said. “Because when people move into the clean energy economy, they shouldn’t have to move away from their tribal lands.” 

The Permitting Impediment

State officials at the conference were both excited and anxious about the challenges ahead in using the BIL funds for local projects.

Kenneth E. Wagner, Oklahoma’s secretary of energy and environment, said his department has been visiting D.C. since January to talk with DOE and White House officials about BIL.  

“We’ve been all DOE all the time,” Wagner said during an interview with NetZero Insider. “We’ve got so many tentacles into this low-carbon economy that there are lots of pockets of money” for the state to tap into.

Oklahoma is talking with Department of the Interior about BIL funding for plugging abandoned mines and is looking for federal funds to expand the private investments the state has attracted in both hydrogen and carbon capture, Wagner said.

But Wagner sees permitting as a major impediment to the success of BIL. “We see the billions of dollars soon to be pushed out on demonstration [projects] and implementation at DOE and DOI,” he said. “Every single dollar has to have a NEPA assessment” to ensure compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.

For example, carbon capture projects that inject carbon into the earth need a specific EPA permit — called a Class 6 permit — Wagner said, but he believes the EPA is understaffed for getting these permits out in a timely manner. “The left hand is pushing out money, creating demand, but we’re not seeing a corresponding push on authorization,” he said.

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Stakeholders Call for MISO to Rethink Pared-down Meeting Schedule

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The headline for this story previously implied that MISO itself desired a change in the meeting schedule.]

Weeks into its new scaled-back stakeholder meeting schedule, MISO will re-examine its effectiveness by holding a stakeholder workshop later this month.

The Feb. 22 workshop on MISO’s stakeholder process and engagement comes as several committee chairs have spoken out against the new schedule.

“I hear your concerns. I am taking notes,” Bob Kuzman, the RTO’s head of stakeholder relations, said during a Wednesday Advisory Committee teleconference. “We understand there are hiccups, and there are going to be more hiccups.”

Kuzman said he was collecting opinions during the meeting to take back to MISO leadership.

The grid operator announced late last year a reduced meeting schedule consisting of eight meetings apiece per year for its main stakeholder committees. The committees include the Market Subcommittee, Resource Adequacy Subcommittee, Reliability Subcommittee, Planning Advisory Committee and Regional Expansion Criteria and Benefits Working Group, which makes cost-allocation decisions. (See MISO Modifies Stakeholder Meeting Schedule.)

Client relations staff framed the new meeting schedule as giving its subject-matter experts a meaningful pause between meetings in the transition to in-person meetings after two years of pandemic-induced isolation. The RTO eventually committed to only scheduling meetings through May and held its first series of face-to-face meetings last month. (See MISO Hosts First In-person Meetings amid Pandemic.)

Clean Grid Alliance’s Natalie McIntire suggested MISO use the February workshop to work together with stakeholders, rather than to impose changes.

“This really needs to shift to a collaborative effort with stakeholders instead of dictating changes, hearing complaints and then making adjustments,” she said.

“Stakeholders feel much better when they’re involved in the decision-making process,” Resource Adequacy Subcommittee Chair Chris Plante agreed.

“There are concerns about how the stakeholder process is evolving,” Market Subcommittee Chair Megan Wisersky said. “MISO now controls the stakeholder process without stakeholder discussion or consent. … The concern is the stakeholder process no longer belongs to the stakeholders.”

Wisersky said the lighter meeting frequency has nudged some agenda items into a “post-only” format, where information is posted on the MISO website but not discussed with stakeholders.

Multiple stakeholders also cast doubt that the RTO can accomplish its 2022 goals — finalizing participation models for storage and distributed resources; establishing dynamic line ratings; recommending long-range transmission projects; and possibly creating a seasonal capacity auction — with fewer meetings.

Planning Advisory Committee Chair Cynthia Crane said she noticed that meetings are shorter and “cursory,” with staff making fewer feedback requests of its stakeholders.

“I would encourage MISO to act very swiftly in making improvements,” she said.

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Industry Welcomes DOE’s Better Grid Initiative

The Department of Energy’s Building a Better Grid initiative has been warmly received by those within the industry who see prioritizing national transmission solutions as integral to adding more renewable resources to the grid.

They include Phillip Moeller, executive vice president at Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities.

“Transmission is going to be the key to unlocking those resources that are cleaner but generally far, far away from where the load centers are,” he said during a recent United States Energy Association virtual webinar on the DOE program. “We’re encouraged that there’s more talk about transmission in Washington, with the bipartisan infrastructure bill … not only setting the policies in place that will allow for better planning and ideally more construction, but also figuring out the economic side and giving some clarity to the return on these investments.”

Under Building a Better Grid, DOE will work to identify high-priority national transmission solutions capable of relieving congestion and accommodating more clean-energy resources. The department launched the program last month following the enactment of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that contained billions of dollars for grid infrastructure and expanded federal siting authorities. (See DOE to Tackle Tx Siting, Financing, Permitting in Better Grid Initiative.)

The department says the nation’s grid will need to expand by 60% by 2030 and by three times its size by 2050, if President Biden’s goals of a decarbonized grid by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050 are to be met. It says large renewable projects in remote areas and offshore wind will need high-voltage transmission lines to efficiently bring power to urban demand centers.

However, DOE has determined about 70% of the nation’s existing transmission lines and transformers are more than 25 years old. According to a 2021 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 750 GW of solar and wind and 200 GW of storage were backed up in grid operators’ interconnection queues at the end of 2020.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association CEO Duane Highley, speaking on the same panel with Moeller, said his organization is looking forward to working with DOE. Calling his cooperative a “poorly named company” because it serves four states in its 200,000-square-mile footprint through its member systems, Highley said “transmission is extremely important for us as we’re making our energy transition.”

Based in Colorado, Tri-State intends to meet the state’s 80% decarbonization mandate by 2030.

“In order to do that, many gigawatts of wind and solar have to be moving across time zones in order to balance everything else,” Highley said.

Fortunately for Tri-State, it’s a member of SPP in the Eastern Interconnection, and it has plans to also join SPP’s Western expansion, RTO West. The grid operator has facilitated the construction of more than $10 billion of new infrastructure, much of it to interconnect wind farms on the plains of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

SPP COO Lanny Nickell joined Highley on the panel to share the RTO’s experiences that he thought would be helpful to DOE’s initiative. He said the RTO owes much of its success to an agreement reached more than 10 years ago with its footprint’s state regulators to share transmission upgrade costs.

The result? Nickell said wind generation has grown from providing 6% of SPP’s annual energy needs to now providing 35% on an annual basis, helping reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 29% over the last seven years. He referenced a transmission-value study that indicates new transmission installed since 2015 has provided $5.24 of benefits for every $1 invested. (See “JTIQ, Tx Value Staff Reports,” SPP Markets and Operations Policy Committee Briefs: Jan. 10-11, 2022.)

Nickell said SPP relied on the transmission infrastructure to import up to 14% of its energy during last February’s severe winter storm.

“Our situation would have been much more catastrophic had it not been for the strength of our system and our connections with neighboring systems,” he said. “Extreme weather events are happening much more frequently, and a more resilient system is going to be needed to prepare for future events. Utilities and developers continue to request more renewable resources to add to their portfolios. More transmission is needed to meet these goals reliably and affordably.”

That includes more DC ties between the Eastern and Western Interconnections. Seven of the eight back-to-back DC ties in the U.S. and Canada link SPP with the Western Interconnection, but they only provide 1,320 MW of capacity.

Nickell used an analogy of two neighboring swimming pools linked by a common garden hose to highlight the ties’ limitations.

“Very limited, basic capacity. They’re garden hoses. They’re small,” he said. “That’s what limits us from really obtaining the value and the benefit [of interconnections]. That’s what needs to be considered in terms of really unlocking the system’s value.”

“The need to tie the grid together east to west is directly tied to the DOE proposal because you get a federal entity that could study and bring together private companies to help build and construct this network,” Highley said. “What we really need is to move that solar east and west across time zones. [Building a Better Grid] is going to resolve a lot of our issues with integrating renewables into the grid.”

Asked where new east-west transmission should be built, Nickell said SPP has yet to conduct studies for that but said he would definitely like to see more infrastructure along the Eastern Interconnection’s western footprint.

“We’ve been referred to as the Saudi Arabia of wind. We’ve got a lot of wind potential that we could deliver both east and west,” he said. “A lot of the solar potential, though, exists in the West. Wouldn’t it be great if we could swap those out? We can benefit from solar when the wind’s not blowing and from wind when the sun’s not shining.”

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Maine Roadmap Shows Gap in Public EV Infrastructure Funding

Maine’s recently released Clean Transportation Roadmap shows the state needs to identify significant near-term funding sources for public charging to support electric vehicle adoption.

“There is a gap as we get out to 2024-2025 and the [estimated] number of EVs gets larger,” Geoff Morrison, senior associate with The Cadmus Group, told the Maine Climate Council on Wednesday.

The roadmap, which Cadmus prepared for the state, recommended that Maine adopt California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) and invest in 1,400 public Level-2 and DC fast charger plugs by 2025 to support EV growth from that policy.

With an average DCFC plug cost of between $138,000 and $363,000, Morrison said the chargers are expensive and the economics of installing and maintaining them are challenging. Even with high utilization rates, DCFC units would be unprofitable through 2030, according to the roadmap.

“There’s not a great reason to build them right now if there’s no public incentive,” Morrison said.

ACC II would push the total estimated light-duty EVs in the state to between 120,000 and 160,000 by 2030, according to the roadmap. The California Air Resources Board expects to release a rulemaking for ACC II in June, with the regulation taking effect for model year 2026. (See CARB Preparing Full Course of ZEV Rules for 2022.)

Building the public chargers needed for ACC II growth would require an estimated $71 million investment based on roadmap estimates. DCFC chargers would represent the bulk of that investment at $50.3 million.

However, Maine has only $27 million available for EV infrastructure investments over the next four years, leaving a $44 million gap. Available funding includes $8 million from the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan and $19 million from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The state could narrow the funding gap with potential IIJA competitive grants, which the roadmap estimated would be about $10 million for Maine.

Additional market incentives beyond ACC II are necessary to meet the Maine Climate Council’s call for 219,000 light-duty EVs by 2030. Growing the DCFC network by 15% in 2030 could increase EV sales by 7% for the year, the roadmap said.

New charging infrastructure funding sources identified in the roadmap include a clean fuel standard, vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax, gas tax and carbon mechanism.

Other states are considering or already testing an EV road tax or VMT tax for all passenger vehicles to supplement declines in gas tax revenues that pay for road upkeep. EV users are not assessed a charge in Maine to pay for infrastructure maintenance, according to Joyce Taylor, chief engineer at the Maine Department of Transportation.

The DOT has looked at the issue of declining gas taxes, but EV adoption has not been high enough in the state to warrant solving the problem right now, Taylor said.

A decline in gas taxes from EV adoption is a “national issue that has to be solved nationally, not just state by state,” she said.

An early study of a VMT tax in Maine showed the difficulty of sorting out the capture and allocation of taxes from out-of-state drivers, which is partly why a national solution is necessary, she said.

In a recent study, the Vermont Agency of Transportation estimated that Vermont will lose $5.3 million in gas tax revenues in 2025 from EV market expansion. That study examined the possibility of assessing a per-kilowatt-hour fee for out-of-state drivers when they use charging stations in the state. VTrans determined that a program of that kind, while helpful, would come with administrative difficulties. (See Study: EV Adoption to Cut $5.3M in Vt. Gas Taxes in 2025.)