SPP last week produced more than 18 GW of wind energy for the first time, less than four months after breaking the 17-GW barrier.
The latest record came at 6:08 p.m. Wednesday, when wind production hit 18,259 MW. That exceeded the previous wind peak of 17,861 MW set on Dec. 11. SPP first cracked 17 GW on Sept. 30, when wind production peaked at 17,107 MW.
ERCOT holds the grid operator record with a 19,672-MW wind peak, set last January.
SPP has more than 22 GW of wind capacity.
— Tom Kleckner
By Michael Kuser
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signaled last week that his state will this year continue to step up efforts to decarbonize its economy with an eye to spreading the benefits.
“We must accelerate our transition to renewable energy, because the clock is ticking,” Cuomo said in his State of the State address Wednesday in Albany.
The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (A8429) signed into law last July calls for 70% of New York’s electricity to come from renewable energy resources by 2030, and for electricity to be 100% carbon-free by 2040. It also nearly quadrupled New York’s offshore wind energy target to 9 GW by 2035.
The law’s clean energy mandates also include doubling distributed solar generation to 6 GW by 2025, deploying 3 GW of energy storage by 2030 and raising energy efficiency savings to 185 trillion BTU by 2025.
Cuomo earlier in the week announced that the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) will solicit at least 1 GW of offshore wind energy this year and that a new $20 million Offshore Wind Training Institute at state college campuses on Long Island would begin training 2,500 workers next year.
The state last July awarded offshore wind contracts to Equinor’s 816-MW Empire Wind project and to the 880-MW Sunrise Wind, a joint venture of Ørsted and Eversource Energy. It also plans to commit $200 million to public investments in port infrastructure improvements to serve the new offshore wind industry.
“The creation of the Offshore Wind Training Institute is a critical step in developing the next generation of workers here in New York, who will serve as the backbone for the state’s offshore wind industry and clean energy future for decades to come,” Boone Davis, CEO of Atlantic Offshore Terminals, a developer of offshore wind supply facilities, said in a statement.
NYSERDA this year also plans to award development funds to 21 large-scale solar, wind and energy storage projects across upstate New York, totaling more than 1,000 MW of renewable capacity and 40 MW of energy storage capacity.
“People say you have to choose between a strong economy and a healthy planet, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Cuomo said. “The economy of tomorrow is the green economy.
“This year, let’s go big with an ambitious expansion of electric vehicles and attract the growing industry. It’s a win-win for our environment and our economy,” he said.
Cuomo announced he had chosen Binghamton University professor Stanley Whittingham, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with lithium-ion batteries, to lead a task force to provide the state with “the most aggressive road map to the e-vehicle future.”
Spectrum News quoted Whittingham on Friday: “The easiest vehicles to convert from internal combustion to electric are fleet vehicles, whether the state can take initiative to start converting hundreds of vehicles to electric, convert all the buses to electric.”
Cuomo said the New York Power Authority (NYPA) should plan and build a statewide functional network of charging stations.
The agencies will work with private industry to ensure that one or more fast-charging locations are available in each of the state’s 10 Regional Economic Development Council regions by the end of 2022, that every travel plaza on the New York State Thruway has charging stations by the end of 2024 and that a total of at least 800 new chargers are installed statewide over the next five years.
“Let’s use our collective government purchasing power and make sure that 25% of public transit bus fleets are electrified by 2025 and 100% by 2035,” Cuomo said. “Let’s make $100 million in Green Bank financing available to locate or expand EV manufacturers and suppliers in the state.”
The Green Bank of New York is a state-sponsored investment fund that helps leverage private financing for clean energy industry companies.
NYSERDA and NYPA will provide additional incentives to build more renewable projects and build them faster, focusing on opportunities upstate, and they will build new transmission lines to get the power to consumers who need it downstate, the governor said.
New York also will work this year to reduce fossil fuel consumption in buildings, with NYSERDA launching a $30 million retrofit program to demonstrate solutions for high-profile commercial and multifamily buildings.
NYSERDA will ask property owners, developers, equipment manufacturers and energy efficiency providers to propose ways to cut energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.
By Michael Kuser
RENSSELAER, N.Y. — NYISO on Wednesday unveiled a plan to devote about one day a month in 2020 for stakeholders to discuss reliability and market issues related to the challenge of integrating a slew of clean energy resources into the grid over the next few years, a transition driven primarily by state policy.
“Until the markets reflect the cost of the environmental attributes that we’re trying to maximize, it is difficult to get renewable energy from upstate to the load centers downstate,” Mike DeSocio, the ISO’s director of market design, told the Installed Capacity/Market Issues Working Group (ICAP-MIWG).
NYISO last month published a 122-page “Grid in Transition” report, which will serve as the starting point for stakeholder discussion.
New York’s clean energy goals are reshaping the grid. | NYISO
Organized wholesale electricity markets have brought improved resource efficiency, “but there is more work to be done to deliver additional clean energy into New York City,” DeSocio said.
“New York’s electricity industry is transforming from a grid that is powered by traditional central-station, controllable fossil fuel generation to non-emitting, weather-dependent intermittent resources and distributed generation,” the report said.
Last year’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (A8429) mandates the state to get 70% of electricity from renewable energy resources by 2030, develop 9 GW of offshore wind energy by 2035 and reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040.
The state’s clean energy goals also include doubling distributed solar generation to 6 GW by 2025, deploying 3 GW of energy storage by 2030,and upping its energy efficiency savings to 185 trillion BTU by 2025.
DeSocio said that reliability and resilience were much the same thing, with reliability the desired outcome, and resilience the means of achieving it.
Couch White attorney Kevin Lang, representing New York City, disagreed, saying that the two terms mean different things.
“In the city’s view, when it comes to resilience, the concern is the weakest link in the line or system,” Lang said. “At present, no reliability metric measures this factor.”
With respect to the grid transition discussion, Lang commented that the market provides signals for generation but not for transmission, adding that it is not clear that transmission is wholly a market responsibility.
Lang agreed with DeSocio’s response that the markets may not be the sole source of signals regarding the need for new transmission.
The grid paper did a good job of emphasizing the market, “but the afternoon will come when you need reserves, but also need energy prices not to be in scarcity pricing,” said Mark Reeder, representing the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACE NY).
“If you squeeze the high prices into a narrow band of hours, I wonder whether the ISO has thought about scarcity pricing,” Reeder said. “I worry about the exercise of market power.”
New York state economy-wide GHG emissions history and future reduction goals | NYISO
DeSocio replied that the ISO has thought about the topic, which it refers to as shortage pricing.
“The shortage pricing construct can be the right kind of signal for resources able to respond very quickly, from off to on in a very short period of time,” DeSocio said.
On carbon pricing, DeSocio said the ISO has done its job and that it’s up to the state to now act on the issue.
“We hope for a carbon pricing signal within the next six months, whether carbon pricing is a good idea or to stop talking about it,” he said. “We are not abandoning carbon pricing, but at the same time, we’re not talking about it much because it’s in the state’s hands to indicate where to go.”
The MIWG took over last January from the Integrated Public Policy Task Force (IPPTF), a joint effort between the ISO and the state’s Public Service Commission that spent a year-and-a-half developing the carbon pricing proposal released in December 2018.
The state must put a price on carbon in its electricity market if it hopes to meet the aggressive timelines of the decarbonization goals set out in the new law, the co-author of NYISO’s carbon pricing study, Analysis Group’s Sue Tierney, said in October. (See Carbon Pricing Vital to NY Goals, Study Author says.)
In addition, NYISO has registered support for carbon pricing in New York from many organizations, the latest of which is the New York League of Conservation Voters, which included support for carbon pricing in its 2020 Legislative Agenda.
“Putting a price on carbon is the only way New York can even come close to meeting its emissions goals,” Mark Younger of Hudson Energy Economics said Wednesday.
Howard Fromer, director of market policy for PSEG Power New York, said the state government acted to meet an environmental challenge, and that “markets have been successful at addressing environmental concerns, the most dramatic evidence being the reductions in nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides over the past couple decades.”
Energy market design specialist Ashley Ferrer presented a rough outline of the process for the grid transition discussions this winter and spring.
Associate capacity market design specialist Emily Conway laid out the timeline through May, with ICAP/MIWG meetings on grid transition reliability and market issues scheduled for Feb. 4, March 6 and 26, and May 11.
NYISO has scheduled stakeholder meetings from January to June 2020 to discuss topics related to the transformation of the grid. | NYISO
The outline referred stakeholders to potential questions in a project planning and market product file from last September, which included the following under reliability and market considerations:
By Tom Kleckner
Faced with a Feb. 9 deadline to rule on J.P. Morgan’s proposed $4.3 billion purchase of El Paso Electric, the Texas Public Utility Commission said last week it will take the matter up for consideration during its next two open meetings (49849).
Should the PUC not meet the deadline, set in motion in August when EPE and J.P. Morgan’s Infrastructure Investments Fund (IIF) and Sun Jupiter Holdings holding company filed a merger application with the commission, it would then have to file an extension.
The PUC is required to rule on acquisitions, mergers and other transactions within 180 days. It will meet twice in open session before the deadline — on Jan. 16 and 31.
“I don’t particularly want to [extend the proceeding],” PUC Chair DeAnn Walker said at the conclusion of a Jan. 7 hearing on the transaction.
To that end, Walker asked staff to spend more time with the documents and ensure “everything is tied down” and that the applicants are prepared to answer the commission’s questions during the next open meeting.
“One thing that’s certain is the commission has a very robust process to vet these types of transactions,” said attorney Lino Mendiola, representing IIF. “I can testify this process has been robust, with copious amounts of testimony and numerous discussions, emails and everything else.”
That process has a resulted in a stipulated settlement agreement between the applicants and PUC staff, the Office of Public Utility Counsel, the city of El Paso, and various consumer and labor groups. (See Parties to EPE Acquisition Reach Settlement Agreement.)
The Rate 41 Group, a coalition of school districts and other public entities, withdrew an earlier motion for continuance on Jan. 3 and indicated it wouldn’t oppose the settlement after having made “significant” progress on its issues.
“We are pleased to be a part of a very comprehensive settlement that addressed virtually every concern someone could raise,” Mendiola said.
The lone holdout to the settlement is retired veterinarian Richard Bonart, who once served on El Paso’s Public Service Board. Bonart raised concerns over the stipulated agreement’s revision of the applicants’ commitment to a $100 million economic development fund, saying the loss of the words “sustainability” and “community” provided an “inferior product.” He argued that the new language would place the poorer communities around El Paso at a disadvantage.
“Those people should reap the benefits from this fund,” he said. “What you’re creating with this fund is a black box, a leap of faith. ‘Just let us do it, and we’ll take care of everything.’ I don’t think the way this is set up will guarantee … good performance.”
Bonart was given the opportunity to question the hearing’s only two witnesses: Darryl Tietjen, director of the PUC’s Rate Regulation Division, and EPE CFO Nathan Hirschi.
Tietjen reiterated earlier testimony supporting the stipulated agreement, saying the agreement “reflects an appropriate and reasonable balancing of the interests of EPE, its customers and other participants in the Texas electricity market.”
“Any changes to the stipulation could undermine its purpose, result in the withdrawal from the stipulation by signatories negatively affected by the changes, and create additional litigation and costs,” Tietjen said, reading his testimony aloud. He said he felt “absolutely confident” that El Paso ratepayers would not bear the burden funding the economic commitments, pointing to his role in annually gathering utility earnings reports.
Hirschi told Bonart that the fund, to be allocated 80-20 between El Paso and the state of New Mexico, was an “effective way to distribute the resources.”
IIF has also reached an agreement with government agencies, organizations and a lone intervenor in New Mexico. The state’s Public Regulation Commission, which also must approve EPE’s purchase, has scheduled a hearing on Jan. 16.
By Holden Mann
The Nominating Subcommittee for NERC’s new Reliability and Security Technical Committee (RSTC) is considering the final group of nominees for the 34-person entity’s first slate of members following the elections of sector representatives.
Nominations to fill 10 at-large seats closed Friday, RSTC Chairman Greg Ford told the Member Representatives Committee’s (MRC) pre-meeting informational conference call last week. The Nominating Subcommittee — composed of Ford, RSTC Vice Chair David Zwergel, Board of Trustees Vice Chair Janice Case, CEO Jim Robb and MRC Vice Chair Jennifer Sterling — will announce their choices at the next meeting of the board Feb. 6 in Manhattan Beach, Calif.
The at-large members will join representatives chosen from sectors 1-10 and 12. Each sector was allocated two seats last year when NERC approved the creation of the new committee, which will replace the Planning, Operating and Critical Infrastructure Protection committees. Because all but four sectors put forward more than two names, they held elections to narrow the field. (See Elections Underway for New NERC Panel.)
Elected were:
The Nominating Subcommittee will consider several factors in choosing at-large members, primarily interconnection diversity, Canadian representation, entity sector and size, and areas of expertise, with the goal of ensuring a well-rounded overall membership.
“We’ve got a matrix that has got all of the attributes of those that were elected, and what we plan to do is look at the different areas such as operations planning or both physical and cybersecurity, where would we like to have a little more expertise,” Ford said.
The RSTC will hold its first meeting March 4 to elect the executive committee. Its initial regular meeting in June will coincide with the final meetings of the retiring committees.
All representatives are set to take their seats at the RSTC’s first regular meeting in June. Half of the initial members will serve two-year terms expiring in 2022, while the rest will serve three-year terms ending in 2023. After the inaugural terms, future members will serve for two years, expiring in alternating years.
[Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the names of the nominating committee members and the location of the February Board of Trustees meeting.]
By Holden Mann and Rich Heidorn Jr.
Although fears of an imminent U.S. military conflict with Iran eased last week, cybersecurity experts cautioned that the country remains an increasing cyber threat with ambitions for attacks on U.S. infrastructure.
Concerns about a cyber offensive from Iranian state actors have grown since the country pledged to retaliate for the Jan. 2 U.S. drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. After responding Jan. 7 with a missile attack on two bases housing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Iranian leaders said they “do not seek escalation or war.”
But that doesn’t mean Iran won’t continue to pursue cyber warfare, which experts say it sees as a “force multiplier” against the U.S.’ more powerful military. Western intelligence agencies have identified Iran, along with North Korea, Russia and China, as the countries with the most sophisticated cyber offensive capabilities.
News of the Soleimani attack prompted Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to reissue the agency’s June 2019 alert that noted “a recent rise in malicious cyber activity directed at United States industries and government agencies by Iranian regime actors and proxies.”
“Time to brush up on Iranian TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] and pay close attention to your critical systems, particularly ICS [industrial control systems],” he tweeted. “Make sure you’re also watching third-party accesses!”
“Iran maintains a robust cyber program and can execute cyberattacks against the United States,” DHS said in a terrorism threat bulletin Jan. 4. “Iran is capable, at a minimum, of carrying out attacks with temporary disruptive effects against critical infrastructure.”
CISA followed with a warning Jan. 6 urging businesses to “assess and strengthen your basic cyber and physical defenses.”
Some 85% of cybersecurity experts polled by The Washington Post said the U.S. should expect serious cyberattacks from Iran in the next few months.
“It is almost a foregone conclusion that we will now see retaliatory cyberattacks on U.S. assets by Iran,” Richard Henderson, head of global threat intelligence for security firm Lastline, told SecurityWeek. “Iran has shown a demonstrated ability and propensity to go after heavy industry. Any organization with substantial ICS infrastructure should be on high alert now for potential attacks. Heavy industry, oil and gas, electrical generation and the attached grid infrastructure, as well as other critical infrastructure, are all caught in the crosshairs as of this moment.”
“I can’t say one way or another if Iran was contemplating a cyberattack before the U.S. strike,” Michael Daniel, CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance and former cybersecurity coordinator under President Barack Obama, told Yahoo Finance. “What I can say is that the U.S. and other Western countries should also be prepared for the Iranians to use their cyber capabilities as part of a retaliation effort.”
After the 2015 nuclear deal it signed with the U.S. and others, Iran mainly limited its cyber efforts to the Middle East, said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis for security firm FireEye. In May 2018, President Trump said the U.S. would no longer honor the deal and imposed sanctions on the Iranian regime. “In light of [the Soleimani assassination], resolve to target the U.S. private sector could supplant previous restraint,” Hultquist told SecurityWeek.
DHS said it had seen “no specific, credible threats” to the U.S. since the general’s killing. But the nature of cyber warfare means it could be weeks or months before threats materialize, experts said.
Iran has been linked to several destructive online attacks in recent years, mostly in the Middle East. Its most well known operation was the Shamoon virus, which infiltrated Saudi Arabia’s national oil company Saudi Aramco in 2012 and overwrote the hard drives of more than 35,000 computers. Restoring the affected systems took more than a week.
Such “wiper” attacks could cause major problems for utilities. However, security experts say creating widespread havoc in the North American grid by this method would take considerable effort, which has not been observed so far.
Wiper attacks require “weeks if not months of preparation and intrusion work,” Nathan Brubaker, a senior manager at FireEye, told ERO Insider. “More sophisticated targeted destructive cyberattacks would require the same intrusion activity … as well as extensive preoperational planning and significant amounts of expertise to understand a target’s industrial process and how to interact with it in order to cause a desired outcome.”
DHS’ June 2019 alert said Iranian actors and proxies were using tactics like spear phishing (emails appearing to come from a trusted sender that are intended to trick individuals into revealing confidential information), password spraying (a brute force attack in which hackers test a small number of commonly used passwords on a large number of accounts) and credential stuffing (using stolen information related to one system to try to get into other systems).
“What might start as an account compromise, where you think you might just lose data, can quickly become a situation where you’ve lost your whole network,” DHS said, urging the use of multifactor authentication.
Facebook, Twitter and Google suspended dozens of accounts in mid-2018 for taking part in Iranian government phishing campaigns.
In addition to the 2012 Saudi Aramco attack, Iran has been blamed for the 2014 assault that took out computers, phones and email at Las Vegas Sands’ headquarters after CEO Sheldon Adelson suggested a nuclear attack on the country.
Iran also was accused of the distributed denial of services attacks that hit almost four dozen U.S. financial services firms over about 18 months beginning in late 2011. In 2016, federal officials announced they had indicted seven Iranians with links to the Revolutionary Guard Corps for the attacks, which blocked hundreds of thousands of customers from online access to their bank accounts.
In 2013, an Iranian national allegedly gained access to the supervisory control and data acquisition system for the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye, N.Y., allowing him to monitor water levels, temperature and the status of the sluice gate. But Brubaker said this event, while significant, should not be exaggerated.
“There is a huge difference between remotely accessing a SCADA system and having enough knowledge about and access to the target’s control systems and processes to cause a specific desired outcome,” such as an explosion, Brubaker said.
For example, an intruder who wishes to cause significant damage to a nuclear facility needs a sophisticated understanding of the physics behind its operation in order to predict the results of any remotely entered command. Moreover, the attacker must be able to circumvent the plant’s independent safety systems that may intervene to return the system to normal. Neither of these is within the realm of capabilities that Iran’s cyber forces have demonstrated to date.
Security firm IronNet issued a briefing this month that identified several hacker groups believed associated with Iran.
It included a group known as Tortoiseshell, which in addition to targeting IT service providers in Saudi Arabia, has run a separate campaign targeting U.S. military veterans with a fake website purporting to help them find jobs. “This attack is believed to be a supply chain attack, enacted to enable access to the IT service providers’ customers, but it is unclear which specific customers were targeted,” IronNet said.
The group APT34, also known as the OilRig group, is believed responsible for a July 2019 campaign that used fake LinkedIn profiles purporting to belong to college faculty members. The effort was intended to build trust with targets in order to deliver malware through file attachments.
The same group was believed to have run several domain name server (DNS) hijacking campaigns in early 2019, prompting an emergency directive from CISA requiring U.S. government agencies to verify their DNS records and ensure their DNS management accounts were secured.
Last October, Microsoft reported that Iranian hackers were involved in an information operation that attempted to compromise email accounts of U.S. government officials, journalists covering political campaigns and accounts associated with a presidential campaign, later identified by The New York Times as that of Trump.
Marc Child, chair of NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee and information security program manager for Great River Energy, said the heightened concerns over Iran provided an opportunity to see how security measures play out in real-world scenarios.
“It has been interesting to watch the response from our intelligence-sharing partners. The Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council and the E-ISAC [Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center] really stepped up quickly to provide utilities with the information we need,” he told ERO Insider. “It feels like we’ve taken the lessons learned from GridEx and put them to immediate practice.”
By Tom Kleckner
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association said Thursday that it will shut down 1,111 MW of coal-fired generation and an associated coal mine, bending to environmental pressures and market economics.
The Colorado-based cooperative announced the retirement of its last New Mexico coal plant by the end of this year and its remaining Colorado coal units and coal mine by 2030.
CEO Duane Highley said during a media conference call that carbon-reduction legislation in Colorado and New Mexico, the “economics of operating a [coal-fired] power plant in a competitive market,” and the addition of low-cost renewables led to a push from Tri-State’s membership to develop a future plan for the organization.
“The very, very low cost of renewables coming online are coming in well below the variable cost of fossil fuel plants,” Highley said. “We’re member-owned and -governed. Our members asked us to come up with a plan that is both financially and environmentally viable.”
Tri-State, with 43 member electric cooperatives and public power districts in four states, announced the development of its Responsible Energy Plan in July in an “aggressive” transition to a cleaner energy portfolio and to ensure compliance with state environmental regulations.
That was Step 1. The next step was Thursday’s announcement that it would retire New Mexico’s Escalante Generating Station at the end of this year and Colorado’s three-unit Craig Generating Station by 2030.
The 253-MW Escalante plant began operations in 1984. Tri-State previously retired its share of coal-fired Unit 3 of San Juan Generation Station in New Mexico in 2017.
The 1,285-MW Craig plant’s three units went into service between 1979 and 1984. Tri-State is the majority owner of the 410-MW Unit 2 and full owner of the 448-MW Unit 3. The cooperative said it is working with Unit 2’s other owners, which include Xcel Energy, PacifiCorp, Platte River Power Authority and Salt River Project, to determine the details of its retirement.
A previously announced 2025 closure date for the 427-MW Unit 1 will remain unchanged.
Tri-State will also close by 2030 its Colowyo Mine, which solely feeds Craig. The plant is also the only buyer of coal from Trapper Mine, which is owned by Tri-State and other utilities. Highley said it will be up to the plant’s other owners to decide its fate once Craig closes.
“I anticipate [Trapper] having difficulty remaining open when the [plant] is gone,” Highley said. “[The ownership] will have to decide what to do.”
The cooperative still has 783 MW of minority ownership stakes in the Laramie River and Springville coal-fired plants in Wyoming and Arizona, respectively. Asked whether Tri-State could simply withdraw from those contracts, Highley, who joined the cooperative less than a year ago, said he was not familiar with the details of any commitments.
Tri-State’s announcement drew a shout-out from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis during his State of the State address Thursday and praise from environmental organizations.
Polis, who has pushed legislation designed to make Colorado carbon-free by 2040, used Tri-State as an example of the private sector seeing a “profitable future in renewables.” (New Mexico last year passed legislation requiring 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045.)
“We’re also excited to work with Tri-State to allow its 17 member co-ops across the state to generate more renewable energy locally,” Polis said. “We want communities to have the option of reaping the benefits of more clean, low-cost local energy generation. … It is a bold step to protect the future of the planet we all must inhabit.”
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Nick Steel noted that a 2018 RMI analysis of Tri-State’s coal fleet had determined the cooperative’s members would save $600 million through 2030 by retiring its coal-fired plants and investing in a replacement portfolio of clean energy resources.
The association’s “announcement represents a critical step toward achieving those savings for Tri-State’s members,” Steel said in a statement. “Importantly, due to falling prices for renewable resources in the Western United States since 2018, the cost savings that Tri-State can capture as a result of these announced coal plant retirements will likely be even higher than we estimated in 2018.”
Western Resource Advocates’ Erin Overturf, deputy director of the nonprofit environmental group’s Clean Energy Program, agreed.
“Closing these coal-fired power plants is an important step that will help Tri-State reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful air pollutants, while also lowering electricity costs for its members,” she said. “Continued operation of coal plants is increasingly more expensive than shifting to cleaner resources like wind and solar.”
Both Polis and Highley referenced their working together on “proactive legislation” and ensuring employees affected by the closures are taken care of.
“That’s the key for us: maintaining stable rates and reliable power for our members,” Highley said. “To provide certainty for our members and employees and communities, wholesale electric rates have to be stable. We’re confident we can manage these closures while maintaining stable rates.”
Highley put off discussing the Responsible Energy Plan and replacement power until next week, preferring, he said, to stay focused on Tri-State employees and its communities over the next few days. He said the coal closures will mark a “significant downsizing of the company and a significant loss of jobs,” touching almost half the employees.
Tri-State has 600 employees directly involved in coal production and another 100 “probably” impacted, Highley said.
Highley did say the Responsible plan will result in a “significant” investment in renewables and rural electrification initiatives.
Tri-State has issued six requests for proposals for renewable energy resources, resulting in power contracts for 656 MW of utility-scale wind and solar resources. The cooperative says nearly a third of the electricity used by its consumers comes from renewable resources.
By Rich Heidorn Jr.
NERC opened the new year with two big personnel announcements, introducing a new head of the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) and saying farewell to retiring Trustee Dave Goulding.
Manny Cancel, who retired last month as chief information officer for Consolidated Edison, joined NERC on Tuesday as senior vice president and chief executive officer of the E-ISAC.
NERC said Cancel, who worked for Con Ed for nearly four decades, will lead the E-ISAC management team and be the center’s “key external face” before the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), government and industry. He will oversee development of the revised E-ISAC Long-Term Strategic Plan.
Cancel has been active in the Member Executive Committee (MEC), an advisory group for the E-ISAC formed out of the ESCC.
“Having an executive of Manny’s stature and experience lead [the E-ISAC] is a rare and welcome opportunity,” NERC CEO Jim Robb said in a statement. “Over the last two years, the E-ISAC has built a strong foundation. … I know Manny will help us take it to the next level.”
Cancel, who has an undergraduate degree in management information systems from Baruch College and an MBA from Cornell University, serves on the advisory board of Per Scholas, a nonprofit that offers tuition-free technology training and professional development for individuals from “overlooked communities.”
Improving the capabilities of the E-ISAC is a key priority for NERC, which announced a five-year expansion plan in 2017. The center added nine full-time equivalent employees in 2019 and plans to add seven in 2020 and 14 through 2022. Its 2020 budget is almost $31.3 million, a 13.3% increase from 2019 and up from about $18.6 million in 2017.
NERC spokeswoman Kimberly Mielcarek said the revised E-ISAC strategic plan is “in the early phases” and is expected to be completed this year. “Manny and the ISAC team will work with the MEC on a timeline,” she said via email.
Cancel fills the spot that has been vacant since SVP Marcus Sachs, who formerly oversaw the E-ISAC, left NERC in December 2017. (See NERC Parts Ways with Chief Security Officer.)
Bill Lawrence took over day-to-day management of the E-ISAC with Sachs’ departure. Lawrence was promoted to vice president, chief security officer and director of the E-ISAC in August 2018.
Lawrence has apparently been away from NERC since at last October, when he was mysteriously absent at GridSecCon, E-ISAC’s annual conference. (See Robb Sees Calmer 2020 After ‘Turbulent’ Year.)
Lawrence is expected to return this month, Mielcarek said. “All I know is he took personal time off,” she said.
Meanwhile, NERC said it had begun a search for a Canadian trustee following the announcement that Goulding had retired from the Board of Trustees effective Jan. 1 after serving nearly a decade.
Goulding served as chair of the Northeast Power Coordinating Council for almost three years after retiring as CEO of Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator in 2006.
He graduated from the University of Bradford in England and worked in transmission and generation construction, operations, and maintenance with the U.K.’s Central Electricity Generating Board before its privatization in the 1990s.
At NERC, Goulding chaired the Enterprise-wide Risk Committee, and served on the Finance and Audit Committee and the Nominating Committee.
“Dave brought deep operational and management experience to all facets of the board’s work. He has been instrumental in revamping our Enterprise-wide Risk Committee, providing pivotal oversight of NERC’s corporate risk management program,” board Chair Roy Thilly said in a statement.
Goulding, who was traveling and unavailable for comment, said in a statement: “I will always be a proponent of the need for the unique approach NERC brings to assuring reliability of the grid.”
By Amanda Durish Cook
CARMEL, Ind. — MISO says it may reduce the capacity accreditation of some of its load-modifying resources in an effort to improve resource availability in its footprint.
Speaking at a Resource Adequacy Subcommittee meeting Wednesday, MISO planning adviser Davey Lopez said the RTO is considering basing an LMR’s accreditation on the smaller of either an average of its actual availability over a three-year period or its tested availability. LMRs that can respond more often and with shorter lead times will receive a larger capacity credit, he said.
Lopez noted that LMRs are currently “receiving capacity credit that’s disconnected from what we see in” the MISO Communications System (MCS). He said an LMR with a four-hour lead time that can respond to 20 calls during a planning year currently receives the same capacity credit as an LMR with an eight-hour lead time that can only respond the requisite five times per year. MISO is proposing that better-performing LMRs receive a higher capacity credit while slower LMRs with spottier service receive a percentage based on a still undetermined calculation in a loss-of-load expectation (LOLE) study.
“That’s the gap we’re trying to close here,” Lopez said, reminding stakeholders that the proposal is still a draft.
MISO stakeholders should expect an April filing with FERC to adjust LMR accreditation in some manner, Lopez said.
The changes are proposed as LMRs take an increasing slice of the RTO’s capacity supply. MISO has gone from clearing about 9 GW of LMRs in its Planning Resource Auction in 2017 to almost 12 GW in 2019. Lopez said that since the last PRA in April, LMRs’ daily availability on average is about 4 GW short of what was cleared, according to MCS self-reporting of availability.
Multiple stakeholders asked why MISO would rely on MCS data when the stakeholder community has called navigation of the nonpublic MCS site clunky and confusing. They called for the RTO to reinvigorate a shelved effort to improve the MCS for its users. (See MISO to Fix Communications System Shortcomings.)
“This is now the second time you’ve come before us about LMRs. There was a filing last year on LMRs; now there’s going to be a filing this year. If LMRs are such a concern, then this MCS tool needs to get fixed, and the senior management needs to get on board with getting it fixed,” Customized Energy Solutions’ Ted Kuhn said, prompting nods of agreement from several stakeholders. “I continue to find that using MCS data is problematic.”
“I guess my response is that the MCS is our system of record,” Lopez said, adding that it’s undeniable that LMRs aren’t showing up as promised. “We want to give our operators the best information possible during emergencies. And right now, what’s clearing in the PRA is nowhere near what’s showing up in the MCS. … The accreditation should reflect that.” Lopez said LMR availability has become especially important given that MISO now experiences the possibility of an emergency in every month, not just the summer ones.
Lopez said recent analysis shows LMRs’ uneven availability contributes to about a 2-GW increase in the planning reserve margin (PRM) requirement. Removing LMRs from the equation reduces the requirement from 136 GW to 134 GW for the 2020/21 planning year.
Kuhn suggested MISO create a separate class of better-performing LMRs for capacity auction purposes. “An LMR-plus, or something,” he said.
Independent Market Monitor David Patton has recently criticized MISO’s planning studies for still assuming that emergency resources are available to respond even when their long lead times preclude them from doing so. Patton said the problem remains that the RTO must first declare an emergency before calling up LMRs for dispatch.
MISO early last year promised to issue LMRs individualized scheduling instructions before an emergency occurs based on their unique notification times. It has also promised to confirm or withdraw advanced scheduling instructions at least two hours prior to an expected emergency event.
The LMR proposal is part of MISO’s resource availability and need project, a multistage endeavor divided into resource adequacy and market improvements.
While MISO’s Market Subcommittee focuses on possible market changes, including emergency pricing edits and providing market information in advance of the day-ahead market, the RASC is dissecting a possible seasonal PRA and new LOLE modeling and capacity resource accreditation. (See MISO Weighs Seasonal Capacity, Accreditation Plan.)
Lopez said the possibility of a seasonal auction is still on the table, though it will be discussed at later RASC meetings.
MISO also used Wednesday’s meeting to unveil a proposal to model more real-world conditions in its annual LOLE study, encompassing more generation outage risk and intermittent resource behavior.
Lopez said MISO wants to use “more appropriate” wind generation and intermittent resource output levels that are based on unforced capacity values in non-summer months.
MISO is also proposing to combine 30 load shapes to create a more realistic outage pattern for a typical weather year and use the actual availability of its demand response resources to predict the likelihood that they’ll respond.
“If we plug these changes into the 2020 PRM model, it’s approximately a 1% increase to the PRM,” Lopez said.
ISO-NE on Wednesday asked FERC to approve a limited Tariff waiver that would allow market participants to adjust or withdraw their retirement or permanent delist bids for Forward Capacity Auction 15, which are due March 13.
In seeking the flexibility for its participants, the RTO noted the potential for its Energy Security Improvements (ESI) market design to change after the submission deadline.
FCA 15 covers the capacity commitment period beginning June 1, 2024, when the grid operator now intends to implement ESI.
The New England Power Pool’s Markets Committee is meeting three days a month this winter to complete the ESI work before FERC’s April 15 deadline for a filing (EL18-182). (See FERC Extends ISO-NE Fuel Security Filing Deadline.)
ISO-NE said that if FERC grants the waiver, retirement bids will remain due March 13 and that the waiver would apply in the event the RTO makes a non-clerical change to the ESI market rules, in which case a participant could either update or withdraw its delist bid.
“It is very possible” that the RTO will not have completed the market design and Tariff revisions for ESI by the existing capacity retirement deadline, it said in its request.
The Markets Committee will likely take an initial vote on ESI before March 13, but the design may evolve further before a final vote by the full NEPOOL Participants Committee is taken on or around April 2, 2020, the RTO said.
“Should this occur, the delist bids might not accurately reflect the impacts of the ESI market rules, in the form in which the rules are filed with the commission on April 15, 2020,” it said.
— Michael Kuser
