By Robert Mullin

SALT LAKE CITY — The Western Electricity Coordinating Council will launch an initiative next month to streamline bulk power system planning in the West. The effort seeks to tighten coordination and clarify who does what among the myriad planning groups, utilities and other industry stakeholders across the sprawling region.

WECC will create a new “BPS Roles” task force in January and expects to present an outreach and communication plan to its Board of Directors at the organization’s annual meeting in September 2020.

The effort is one of WECC’s “near-term priorities,” endowing it with a sense of urgency as the region’s BPS faces unprecedented and accelerating change from increased use of renewables and distributed energy resources, expansion of markets such as West’s RC Transition Earns Plaudits.)

Stakeholders attending a WECC Members Advisory Committee meeting Dec. 3 expressed broad support for the effort. Dozens of organizations have a hand in the West’s BPS planning, including formal planning groups (such as the soon-to-be merged Columbia Grid and Northern Tier Transmission Group), load-serving entities, transmission and generation owners, public interest groups and merchant developers. Rounding out the list are “assessment groups” such as NERC, FERC, the Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Board and WECC itself.

Kicking off a technical panel discussion to explain the initiative, WECC System Adequacy Planning Manager Byron Woertz showed a clip from “Miracle,” the 2004 film about the U.S. men’s ice hockey team that defeated a heavily favored Soviet team in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

The scene depicts coach Herb Brooks chiding the overly confident but incohesive team of college athletes following a humiliating loss: “You think you can win on talent alone? Gentlemen, you don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.”

“In the West, we have talented planners, but we don’t have enough talent to solve our problems on our own,” Woertz told the audience of WECC stakeholders, staff and board members. “We need to coordinate with each other.”

‘The Punchline’

Three panelists joined Woertz to explain the rationale for the initiative, describe how WECC intends to approach it — and to provoke discussion among members.

“We know things are changing. When we look around the system, it’s not the same system that it was 20, 30, 40 years ago,” said Enoch Davies, WECC’s manager of system stability planning. Davies said system planners must gather more data on DERs connected with distribution systems: “That’s one thing that we have to improve coordination on — is how we get that information.”

Chelsea Loomis, regional electric system planning manager at NorthWestern Energy, said the use of the transmission system is also going to change. “And I think we’re experiencing that [change] as well, as entities are entering the Energy Imbalance Market or changing RCs. We’re just seeing a lot of different use on the transmission system itself.”

Woertz noted that — similar to DERs — utility-scale renewable resources are more widely dispersed than the fossil-fueled and hydroelectric resources that have traditionally dominated the grid. “The coordination among not only the organizations and the different planning roles, but [also among] the resources themselves, is going to be a challenge moving forward,” he said.

“As we see everything else changing, we probably need to change with it in our planning methods. I think that’s kind of the punchline of this whole discussion,” Davies said.

“Particularly if we want to maintain the same level of reliability that we’ve grown accustomed to,” Loomis added.

Growth Opportunity

Woertz broke the information-gathering process down to three key points: gathering the right data, from the right people, at the right time.

“There’s a lot of data out there. Make sure you’re getting from the people that really own that data. Make sure it’s timely — that you’re getting current information,” Woertz said.

“Regarding distribution generation, that’s a struggle we’re having today,” Davies said. “Where do we get that data? Is it distribution providers? Maybe that’s the right group; maybe it’s not.”

Loomis also pointed to the increased collaboration needed to create WECC’s “anchor data set,” the compilation of load, resource, unit dispatch and planning base case information to be used by the Western Interconnection’s regional planning groups as part of their transmission plans. That effort, kicked off five years ago, is still a work in progress.

Using the language of personal development, Northwest Power Pool’s Dave Angell, chair of WECC’s Reliability Assessment Committee (RAC), joked that the committee’s creation of the anchor data set has been “an opportunity for growth for a lot of folks.” The group has produced one anchor data set, is starting to produce the second and has set up a task force to review its first effort, he said.

One of Angell’s goals for the RAC is to fix inconsistencies in planning base cases. He noted that power flow base cases designed for planning are also used for reliability studies. “Those engineers that do reliability studies have a particular expectation of what information is in those particular cases, and they’re not at all interested in fictitious transmission lines and resources and all these things that might come about 10 years from now. ‘If it isn’t in the ground today, or if it isn’t under construction today, I don’t want it in my cases.’

“That ends up creating a disparity between looking at the future 10 years out, where a wind plant can be put up in matter of months,” Angell said. “We’re not talking years like older thermal plants used to take, and so things could change much more rapidly out there, and the ability for some of these engineers to embrace this sort of new and different world has been a struggle.”

Davies pointed to further “interesting interactions” with transmission and resource planners. “Transmission planners only want very sure things in their cases,” whereas resource planners want to include more speculative projects. “They need to work together to identify what actually should be showing up in those base cases.”

Loomis recounted a story that illustrated the uncertainty of including speculative projects in base cases, describing a proposed 460-MW wind farm that had triggered the need for a new 230-kV line in NorthWestern’s Montana system.

The project had an interconnection agreement and transmission service, but half of the planning team refused to include it in base cases for local area planning, saying they couldn’t rely on the resource.

“And I kind of pushed back and said, ‘They have an interconnection agreement and transmission service — this is a no-brainer,’” Loomis said. “To acquiesce to me, they put it in one of our sensitivity analyses and, lo and behold, the project did indeed go away. It’s really hard to know.”

Loomis also pointed to the case of the Highwood Generating Station, a 46-MW gas-fired project in Montana that broke ground in 2010 but was decommissioned five years later before it ever commenced commercial operation after its sponsor declared bankruptcy.

“It’s really hard to know exactly what [will get built], so I think trying to establish some common rules or common expectations for those types of generation projects that are driven by outside entities is a good thing,” she said.

“What we’re looking at is all these different perspectives using a common data source and process and methods to process the data and disseminate the information,” Angell said.

Sharing the Success

Woertz said gathering all the data was essential for “timely and relevant” reliability assessments.

“Regional planning groups, utilities [and] the ISO are doing their own analyses,” he said. “All of the organizations within the West are doing their own analyses, and they all give us a little bit different look at what the potential risks might be. Again, there’s a great need for collaboration and coordination so we can learn from each other as we’re doing these analyses.”

“And we don’t want to be duplicating analyses — and we want to do the right ones,” Angell added.

Davies pondered the ephemeral nature of the questions planners are trying to answer with their analyses. He said a decade ago, the industry was assuming a large amount of wind generation would be built to “serve all the huge loads in California.”

“It seems a lot different today, doesn’t it? Trying to evolve all those questions over time also is going to be part of this,” Davies said.

Woertz emphasized that another key objective would be putting the reliability results “into the hands of the right people differently and more effectively than we have in the past.”

“It’s not going to be sufficient to send out a mass email just to our committee people,” he said. “There are probably other people we should proactively reach out to, to actually get the message out to folks. WECC deals strictly with information. We don’t build anything; we don’t operate anything. If we have effective information, reliable data and interpretation of that data, that can be shared with other people,” he said.

Promising Signs

Brian Theaker, director of Western regulatory and market affairs for Middle River Power, urged the panelists not to downplay the impact of public policy in its analyses. He also expressed concern that reliability is “taking a backseat” to the imperatives of policymakers who don’t understand the reliability impacts of their decisions.

“What drives everything in California at this point is the race for decarbonization,” Theaker said. “And though there has been some really good work done that tries to look at some of the other perspectives and bring reliability and adequacy into it, there’s still this inexorable drive of public policy towards decarbonization.”

“In California, the policymakers are leapfrogging over the physics of the system,” said Dick Ferreira, of the Transmission Agency of Northern California. “If the lights go out, everybody’s going to point their fingers at each other.”

Loomis agreed with those concerns and noted a similar situation closer to home for her. “Missoula, Mont., announced that they’re going to 100% green by 2030, and everybody besides the city of Missoula is saying, ‘Wow, so you’re looking forward to some brownouts.’”

Maury Galbraith, executive director of the Western Interstate Energy Board, congratulated WECC and the panelists for providing the “most candid conversation” he’s heard about an issue in front of board members in his five years attending WECC meetings. He also reminded them that he brought up the same issue five years earlier with the creation of the anchor data set and the RAC.

“My question to the panelists is: You have a plan for the next nine months [in the BPS Roles effort]. What’s different today? What’s going to energize people to come to the table and try to address these issues, because you still have basically a collaborative approach to getting this data. You’re still trying to work with people and appeal to their best interests and share the data. What’s changed? What’s different now and why are you hopeful that this is going to work?”

Angell replied that RAC participants “are slowly sensing that there is change” and are “slowly changing to catch up.”

“You know the change cycle, right?” Angell said. “The first [reaction] is: ‘You screwed everything up and now you are harming me.’ Well, it takes a little while for some folks to get back out of being stuck in victim mode and to actually step forward and start working towards solving problems.

“We are starting to see some collaboration occur. It’s a start, and I think with this initiative and further emphasis on it, we’ll continue to move forward.”