CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market notched another milestone last week as it welcomed the country’s largest municipal utility and extended its eastern border to include much of New Mexico.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) both commenced trading in the EIM on April 1, coming a week after four publicly owned utilities became participants, including Turlock Irrigation District (TID) and Balancing Area of Northern California members Modesto Irrigation District (MID), City of Redding and Western Area Power Administration-Sierra Nevada Region.
The EIM will grow to 15 members next month with the addition of Montana-based NorthWestern Energy. This spring’s expansion represents the largest ever for the market, which began operations in November 2014 with PacifiCorp as its first member.
“We are very pleased to welcome LADWP and PNM as new participants in the Western EIM,” CAISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in a statement. “We look forward to working with both utilities to bring additional economic and environmental benefits to their customers as we further expand the geographical scope of the real-time energy market.”
LADWP brings significant and wide-ranging transmission assets into the EIM. The utility owns and operates more than 3,600 miles of transmission lines crossing five states, including half of the 3,100-MW Pacific DC Intertie linking the L.A. metro area with the Bonneville Power Administration territory in the Pacific Northwest.
LADWP operates more than 3,600 MW of transmission across five states. | LADWP
Other transmission assets include 60% of the contract capacity rights on the Southern Transmission System line connecting Southern California with the Intermountain Power Plant (IPP) in Utah, a 36% ownership stake in the Mead-Adelanto Transmission Project connected to Nevada, and co-ownership of the Navajo-McCullough Transmission Line between the now-retired Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the McCullough substation in Nevada.
LADWP also controls about 8,000 MW of generating capacity, including the 1,900 MW coal-fired IPP (slated for conversion to an 840-MW gas-fired plant in 2025), 15% of the output from the 2,080-MW Hoover Dam in Nevada, and 5.7% of output from the 3,300-MW Palo Verde nuclear generating station in Arizona.
The utility’s participation in the EIM will be “a win-win proposition for the City of Los Angeles and the Western Grid in terms of fostering the integration of renewable energy while maintaining power reliability, as the City of Los Angeles moves ahead with our goal of 100% renewables as well as assisting all California utilities in meeting the state target of 60% renewables by 2030,” said Reiko Kerr, LADWP senior assistant general manager of power system engineering, planning and technical services.
PNM, BANC, TID
PNM operates 3,189 miles of transmission, including a 500-kV segment from the Palo Verde plant (of which it controls 402 MW of output) and a 345-kV backbone spanning New Mexico and capable of delivering power from the wind-rich eastern reaches of the state to the Four Corners delivery point in the northwest. A portion of the 345-kV line extends into SPP.
The utility owns 2,865 MW of generating capacity, including the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station (847 MW) and Four Corners plant (200 MW). It also has more than 300 MW of wind assets and nearly 120 MW of solar.
PNM operates an extensive transmission network across New Mexico. | PNM
PNM’s participation in the EIM will also include the loads of 11 members of wholesale power cooperative Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which in February transitioned a number of its Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming members to join SPP’s newly launched Western Energy Imbalance Service. (See WEIS Market ‘First Step’ to Full RTO Membership.)
“PNM, CAISO and Tri-State’s close collaboration enabled us to have a smooth entry into the [EIM],” Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said in a statement. “We greatly appreciate the professionalism of the PNM and CAISO staff, who we worked with over many months to enter the market.”
The engagement of MID, Redding and WAPA-Sierra Nevada boosts the roster of BANC participants in the EIM. The group’s largest member, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, joined in April 2016. (See SMUD Goes Live in Western EIM.) BANC members Roseville Electric Utility, City of Shasta Lake and Trinity Public Utilities District have not yet committed.
Like BANC, TID owns a share of the California-Oregon Intertie (COI), the other major transmission line that allows California to tap the Northwest’s hydroelectric resources. TID’s transmission network also links to CAISO at two locations and to the SMUD and WAPA systems at the Tracy substation, the tie-in for the COI.
TID’s generation portfolio includes a 136-MW share of the output from the Don Pedro Dam, the 136-MW Tuolumne Wind Project, nearly 100 MW of gas-fired generation and a 6.8-MW geothermal plant.
“As participants in the EIM, we have the opportunity to further capitalize on the generation infrastructure TID has developed over the years,” TID General Manager Michelle Reimers said.
FERC on Wednesday approved changes to ISO-NE’s tariff that eliminate capacity performance payments for energy efficiency resources (ER21-943). The revisions became effective Thursday.
ISO-NE’s Pay-for-Performance (PfP) capacity market construct is meant to link revenues to resource performance during real-time operational reserve deficiencies via incentives to resources to provide real-time energy or reserves.
“We agree with ISO-NE that energy efficiency resources are not similarly situated to other capacity resources in that they are not able to respond to Pay-for-Performance incentives during capacity scarcity conditions,” the commission wrote.
FERC disagreed with trade group Advanced Energy Economy, which filed a protest that said the RTO’s proposal would result in “unjust and unreasonable and unduly discriminatory treatment” of EE resources. The commission noted that the Federal Power Act “does not prohibit all discrimination, only undue discrimination.”
Projected annual energy use with and without EE and PV savings | ISO-NE
It added that it recognizes EE resources’ value but disagreed with AEE’s contention that they are “similarly situated to nuclear and natural gas resources.” The commission found that EE resources, which cannot provide real-time energy or reserves during capacity scarcity conditions, cannot compare to other resources. It cited a nuclear generator as an example because it could adjust its maintenance schedule to increase the likelihood that it will be online and provide its full capability or reserves during capacity scarcity conditions.
FERC was also not persuaded by AEE’s argument that EE resources are incentivized “to meet or exceed their capacity supply obligations [CSOs] and that accepting ISO-NE’s proposal would remove that incentive.”
“We find that AEE’s arguments misconstrue the intent of ISO-NE’s performance payments, which is to incent the real-time provision of energy or reserves during capacity scarcity conditions,” the commission wrote. “In contrast, compensation for installed capacity, across all resource types, is made by the FCM’s [Forward Capacity Market] monthly base payments, which energy efficiency resources will continue to receive.”
AEE argued that EE resources exceeding their CSOs should continue to receive performance payments during EE measure hours. But, according to FERC, the RTO proved that EE resources do not overperform or underperform during real-time capacity scarcity conditions.
LS Power and the RTO’s Internal Market Monitor, which joined the New England Power Generators Association in filing comments supporting the tariff revisions, noted that EE resources would continue to receive base capacity payments commensurate with their CSOs.
Clements Concurs, but Says FERC May ‘Revisit’
In a concurring statement, Commissioner Allison Clements said that as EE programs “continue to evolve and innovate,” FERC may have to “revisit their eligibility” for future PfP penalties and bonuses.
Clements said that when the commission directed ISO-NE to adopt the PfP construct in 2014, it rejected the RTO’s proposal to require EE resources to either install metering or face guaranteed penalties if a reserve deficiency occurs outside of measured hours. She said that the RTO made an “adequate demonstration” to exclude EE resources from PfP, but now they are “without an avenue” to participate even with the installation of metering as in the original proposal.
With the continued innovation of EE programs, Clements added, they might eventually measure real-time performance.
“Should programs that explicitly measure meter-based energy savings develop in New England, [EE resource] participation rules may warrant a fresh look,” Clements wrote.
NYISO CEO Rich Dewey informed the Management Committee on Wednesday that the ISO in early March had completed its annual stakeholder sector meetings for this year with good input and participation, which was shared on a high level with the Board of Directors. He also announced that the joint board/MC meeting in June will again be a virtual event.
“The next iteration of our market participant survey will be going out soon, and I personally read verbatim every one of the comments,” Dewey added.
Vice President of Operations Wes Yeomans delivered the Winter 2020/21 Cold Weather Operations report, which showed a seasonal peak load of 22,542 MW on Dec. 16, compared with a seasonal 50/50 forecast of 24,130 MW. NYISO’s all-time winter peak load was 25,738 MW on Jan. 7, 2014.
Winter 2020–2021 daily peak loads in perspective | NYISO
“For the most part we did not have a single, brutal cold snap or a long sustained cold snap,” Yeomans said. “To explain the difference between the forecast and the peak, we simply did not have 50/50 weather, but if we had, I imagine the seasonal peak would have been very close to the forecast.”
The Dec. 16 snowfall exceeded that morning’s forecasts by 1 to 2 feet, and the storm proved to be the eighth largest in Albany history and the fourth largest December snowstorm.
The ISO ran the day-ahead forecast on Dec. 15, and as the day proceeded, transmission owners saw the possibility of exceeding the 50/50 forecast peak and thus issued a supplemental resource evaluation (SRE) request for Cricket Valley CC3 on Dec. 16. Transmission owners may request NYISO to issue an SRE to commit additional resources for reliability purposes in a local area.
Natural gas pipelines in New York and throughout the Northeast are running at high capacity factors, as was made evident in the second week of February when colder weather saw a flurry of operational flow orders (OFOs), both daily and hourly, Yeomans said.
A record-setting snowstorm Dec. 16-17, 2020, dumped up to 4.5 feet on parts of New York state. | NWS
On days when gas system reliability could be at risk, the local distribution company or a gas pipeline may invoke an OFO or issue other instructions restricting use of gas imbalance service. Under extreme circumstances, interruptible customers may also have their gas service interrupted to protect gas system reliability.
“The natural gas infrastructure in New York remained in service throughout the winter, yet a number of OFOs were reported on days not identified as particularly cold,” Yeomans said. “We hope to bring more information on that situation to an upcoming OC meeting.”
NYISO is following the FERC-NERC joint inquiry into the February winter storm in ERCOT and SPP, and it intends to review all findings and consider best practices and recommendations as appropriate, Yeomans said.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office launched a new collegiate competition to find solutions for de-risking and increasing the market viability of direct lithium extraction from geothermal brines.
The $4 million Geothermal Lithium Extraction prize is designed to help the U.S. build out its lithium supply chain for electric vehicle batteries and grid-scale battery storage.
The U.S. lithium stock is almost entirely imported, with only 1% sourced domestically, Alex Prisjatschew, general engineer at the Geothermal Technologies Office, said Wednesday during a webinar announcing the competition.
With the growing popularity of EVs with lithium-ion batteries, DOE is hoping its new geothermal lithium extraction prize will help spur technologies for domestic lithium production. | Nissan
“The combination of rapidly expanding global demand and lack of secure domestic supply has created an urgency to develop a safe, domestic and cost-competitive source of lithium,” she said. “Using geothermal lithium brines to extract lithium [can] become a more sustainable way to harness lithium resources.”
State of Play
Currently, no lithium chemicals are produced at commercial scale using geothermal extraction, but Alex Grant, principal at geothermal consulting firm Jade Cover Partners, expects the market for it to mature by 2030.
Geothermal lithium extraction takes advantage of existing geothermal power technologies in commercial operation today, Grant said during the webinar.
In a geothermal facility, power is produced with energy that is extracted from hot, pressurized water (brine) pumped from deep in the ground. That brine is reinjected into the ground, but some extracted brines contain minerals, such as lithium. Geothermal lithium could be removed from the brine on site before reinjection.
About half of the world’s lithium is made from the mineral spodumene that is mined in Australia and converted to lithium chemicals in China, Grant said. The other half is made from large brine ponds in South America through evaporative processing.
If lithium production from geothermal brines enters commercial scale, Grant said the resulting lithium chemicals would be highly competitive in terms of CO2 intensity.
“Geothermal extraction unlocks the ability to make lithium chemicals from very small physical footprints,” he said. “There are no evaporation ponds needed and no open pit, so it drastically reduces the number of square meters required to make a certain quantity of lithium chemicals per year.”
Competition Details
The geothermal lithium extraction competition will include three phases for participants to identify, develop and test their technology solutions. Participants will be eligible to earn cash prizes for their progress.
While competitors must be affiliated with a U.S.-based academic institution, Prisjatschew said DOE is encouraging participation from anyone with a background in oil and gas, mining, engineering or geosciences.
Submissions for the first phase are due July 2, and the competition will run through February 2023. DOE will hold an informational webinar on April 12.
A Maryland House of Delegates committee on Thursday approved legislation to increase the state’s 2030 greenhouse gas reduction target to 50% from 2006 levels, an increase from the current 40% goal (HB 583). But the vote disappointed some because the bill is less ambitious than the version the Senate approved March 12, which set the goal at 60% (SB 414).
House Environment and Transportation Committee Chair Kumar Barve (D) said he supported the 50% target because of concerns the Senate goal was unrealistic.
He said he was deferring to Economic Matters Committee Chair Dereck Davis’ (D) expertise on the electric grid and PJM. “He has said he thought 60% was a pretty tall order, and I have to take him at his word there,” Barve said during an Environment Subcommittee meeting Wednesday.
The committee also stripped from the Senate bill requirements that new commercial and residential buildings of 25,000 square feet or more make at least 40% of the roof “solar ready” and that they exceed the energy-use reductions in the 2018 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Beginning in 2033, such new buildings would have to achieve a net-zero energy balance under the Senate bill. Also eliminated was a requirement that all new schools be solar-ready or net zero beginning in 2022.
Sen. Paul Pinsky (D), lead sponsor of the Senate bill, toldMaryland Matters he was “extremely disappointed” in the House’s amendments. “They almost gutted the bill,” he said.
Pinsky told Barve’s committee on Wednesday that the bill would prompt more aggressive climate actions from the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan (R), such as requiring purchase of zero-emission vehicles for the state’s 4,000-vehicle fleet beginning in 2027. The Maryland Transportation Administration would be required to purchase zero-emission buses beginning in fiscal 2023.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s been much urgency in the administration,” Pinsky said. “I sat on the [Maryland Commission on Climate Change] for a number of years. They’ve rejected more aggressive actions.”
The bill would also require the Commission on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities to recommend a methodology for identifying communities disproportionately affected by climate change and develop recommendations for improving them.
“The environmental justice commission has been moribund for years,” Pinsky said. “So we include some really explicit charges to jump start them.”
The bill also would:
create a Just Transition Employment and Retraining Working Group to identify the skills and training required by jobs to counter climate change and strategies for workforce development and job creation for those whose jobs are threatened by the transition to a low-carbon economy;
set a goal of planting 5 million sustainable native trees in the state by the end of 2030, including at least 500,000 in “underserved” areas;
allocate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auction proceeds exceeding $50 million annually to programs subsidizing zero-emission vehicles, providing loans for net-zero school construction and covering administrative costs for the departments of the Environment and Labor; and
create a Solar Land Use Commission to make recommendations on how the state can meet its solar goals in the face of restrictions on solar projects on agricultural land.
Barve said the land use commission is needed to address opposition to community solar. “We can’t move to a higher rate of carbon-neutral, carbon-free energy sources without actually producing electrons and doing so in the state of Maryland,” he said.
He said some environmental groups are “trying to have it both ways” in pushing for increased renewables but blocking siting of projects.
In an interview with NetZero Insider, Barve cited Montgomery County Council’s vote in February, which he said “functionally banned” community solar from the county’s 93,000-acre Agricultural Reserve.
“There is just a lot of actions like that around the state of Maryland that causes me to wonder if we’re even going to be able to achieve a 40% goal,” he said during a meeting of the Environment Subcommittee on Wednesday.
Barve also noted that while the amendments reduced the 2030 goal, it eliminated a requirement that the goal be reauthorized in 2025. It also kept the Senate bill’s ultimate target of net-zero statewide GHG emissions by 2045.
California’s 2030 GHG target is identical to Maryland’s current 40%. Massachusetts last month enacted legislation committing to a 50% emission reduction by 2030 but from a base of 1990. (See Mass. Governor Signs NextGen Climate Bill.)
Del. Dana Stein (D), vice chair of the Environment and Transportation Committee and lead sponsor of the House measure, defended the revisions to the building efficiency standards. “We listened to building engineers who said that requiring a net-zero energy standard … was not practical without advances in technology and that decoupling the state from national building codes (such as the IECC) would be challenging to implement,” he wrote in an email outlining ways he said the House improved the Senate bill. “We did not want to mandate building standards for which no modeling has been done.”
He noted that the House bill would require new state buildings (including those in which the state will lease more than 50% of the space) use a high efficiency HVAC system such as geothermal if the net present value over 15 years is less than a standard HVAC system. It also requires state agencies to give a price preference for concrete produced with lower GHG emissions.
Reaction
Del. Ann Healey (D) asked Pinsky about organized labor’s opposition to the bill.
Pinsky said it was impossible to estimate the impact of the clean energy transition on labor without the study by the transition work group.
“While I know labor doesn’t support it and they are concerned, I think they understand changes are coming and they want to be at the table. And that’s, at this point, what I can do,” Pinsky said.
Maryland Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles endorsed the House’s amendments, saying it “codifies into law the science-based, ambitious and broadly supported goals and recommendations of Maryland’s independent Commission on Climate Change and the administration’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan released earlier this year. By elevating the plan to enforceable law with urgent requirements and visionary goals, we would demonstrate that Maryland continues to be a national leader with real and achievable commitments to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases and increase climate resiliency and environmental justice.”
Jamie DeMarco, federal and Maryland policy director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told the Environment Subcommittee on Wednesday that his group supported the amendments to ensure speedy passage through the House. Sine Die, the last day of the General Assembly’s 90-day session, is April 12.
“We’re only just seeing the amendments today so we … haven’t had a chance to go through all of them,” he said. “I hope we can continue this conversation as we go forward and possibly in conference committee.”
Asked whether the two differing bills would be resolved in a conference committee, Barve responded: “There’s going to be discussions between us and the Senate before Sine Die, let’s put it that way.”
In the interim, he predicted, “there’s going to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth” over the bill.
The North Carolina Utilities Commission’s public hearing on Duke Energy’s integrated resource plans was originally set for 7 p.m. on March 16. However, a record-breaking 211 groups and individuals signed up to speak, and the single meeting multiplied into a series of six to be held throughout April and May.
The intense interest in the plan reflects the high stakes involved. North Carolina has committed to cutting its carbon emissions 40% by 2025, and 21 cities and counites and 66 companies across the state have made similar or more ambitious pledges. But critics argue that the incremental approach Duke favors won’t get them there.
“In the 21st century, the fact is that the energy system is transforming,” said Tyler Fitch, Carolinas regulatory director at Vote Solar. “If we continue to have these 15-year plans that pretend like everything is going to be the same, it’s going to lead to problems.”
Initially submitted to the NCUC last September, the essentially identical IRPs for Duke’s two subsidiaries in North Carolina, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress, detail how the utility would meet customers’ energy demands over the next 15 years while meeting its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. Duke’s proposed IRPs included six pathways with different carbon reduction strategies.
The options range from a business-as-usual scenario that continues to slowly retire coal, invest little in renewables and buildout natural gas, to a high carbon reduction strategy that heavily invests in wind, solar and battery storage, with no new gas plants.
In public comments filed thus far, only the NCUC’s Public Staff, the commission’s consumer advocate, has supported Duke’s IRPs. Its filing recommends that the commission accept both Duke’s business-as-usual and business-as-usual plus carbon policy pathways as reasonable for planning purposes.
Many more of the comments voice opposition. Top concerns are that coal plants won’t be decommissioned fast enough; continuing to build natural gas plants would raise costs for ratepayers; and renewable energy sources weren’t accurately priced.
“Duke Energy Carolina’s IRP does not account for all the benefits of renewables, assigns inaccurate costs to the adoption of renewable, and fails to address the benefits that might be associated with market reform,” wrote representatives from Apple, Facebook and Google in a public comment. “Its proposed base case appears to be largely modeled on a ‘status quo’ approach, reflecting additional investment in capital-intensive, non-renewable generation for at least the next decade.”
Mark Oliver, the vice president of integrated system planning at Duke, said in a recent statement that all six of the pathways keep Duke on track to meet its climate goals. But many remain skeptical.
In three of the pathways, Duke would retire its coal plants under its deemed “most economic” time rather than the “earliest practicable” time. The utility’s “most economic” scenario, which would be used in three of the six pathways, has four of its 10 coal-fired power plants in operation after 2030, with two plants that have dual coal and gas systems operating until the end of their economic lives.
A big concern for many critics is what would replace coal. In all pathways except for “no new gas,” Duke plans to add between 6,000 and 9,600 MW of natural gas. In a report Fitch authored for the Energy Transition Institute, he calculated that if Duke built 9,600 MW of new gas plants, the cost for ratepayers in North and South Carolina would be $4.8 billion, or $900 per family, based on Duke retiring these plants early to meet climate goals.
A study from the Energy Transition Institute projects that Duke Energy’s stranded coal and natural gas plants could cost consumers $50 million a year by 2035 and up to $175 a year by 2050. | Energy Transition Institute
In his statement, Oliver claimed that the “no new gas” pathway would be the most expensive option for customers, would delay coal retirement and would threaten the reliability and affordability of the power supply.
However, an analysis conducted by Synapse Energy Economics found that Duke could economically meet customer needs without adding gas. Synapse provided alternate dates for coal retirements, increased energy efficiency programs and added renewable resources and battery storage to show that Duke could follow a low-emissions pathway that meets demand while maintaining the utility’s 17% planning reserve margin.
Another frequent criticism was that renewable resources were not fairly priced in the IRPs. A filing from NC WARN, a nonprofit focused on climate change, and the Center for Biological Diversity disputes Duke’s claim that a net-zero plan using battery storage would cost three to four times more than a plan that relies on gas. The groups analyzed trends in battery cost decline, which they found are expected to cost half as much as Duke projected by 2023. The filing also found that Duke’s cost assumptions for gas plants are less than half of actual costs of past plants. Between these two findings, the filing states, Duke’s claim is “negated when accurate pricing is used.”
“What we are talking about here is locking ourselves into a fossil fuel economy for the next 40 or 50 years,” Fitch said. “If we move forward with these plans, we’re going to pay a big premium to catch up.”
Local Governments Rely on Duke’s Efforts
For North Carolina municipalities such as Durham, meeting their climate goals is easier said than done. North Carolina is not considered a home rule state, which means that the state legislature must provide authority to local governments first before they can pass certain legislation.
In this context, Duke could make an enormous difference for local governments. Eleven cities submitted a joint comment to the NCUC, and Raleigh, Charlotte and Asheville submitted additional comments individually. The joint statement said that while the 11 local governments see Duke as an essential energy partner, they have concerns regarding the submitted IRPs.
“It’s new for us local governments to provide comments,” said Tobin Freid, the sustainability manager for Durham County. “We wanted to because what Duke does, the decisions they make, affect our ability to meet our greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”
Durham County has set a goal of reducing county operation emissions 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050.
“If Duke met its own climate goals, we’d be golden,” Freid said. “We would still have to be electrifying our fleet, but then if we were plugging those vehicles into a clean grid, we’re good. Our local tax dollars could instead be spent on people who don’t have food or affordable housing or our K-12 schools, I mean a million other priorities.”
If Duke decides not to pursue one of its high carbon reduction pathways, it may be impossible for Durham to reach net zero emissions by 2050, Freid said.
“Even if we’ve maximized all of our roof potential, electrified our fleet and got rid of natural gas in our buildings, there is still some percentage that we’re buying from Duke,” she said. “If they don’t clean what they’re doing, we won’t meet our goals.”
Equity Concerns Sidelined
Another concern for local governments and other stakeholders was the minimal attention Duke paid to equity concerns in the IRPs.
“I don’t think any of the plans that Duke Energy put forth [will] forward environmental justice or equity in the state,” said Claire Williamson, energy policy advocate at North Carolina Justice Center.
Williamson identified energy efficiency and better home weatherization as key strategies to improve quality of life for low-income North Carolinians, but she does not see Duke prioritizing such programs.
“We just don’t have incentives that are lined up for the utilities to really push for energy efficiency,” she said.
While Duke’s IRPs include some energy efficiency efforts in each of the pathways, the local governments said that it was unclear how historically disadvantaged communities were engaged in developing the plans. “Successful and durable low-income programs engage these communities so that programs benefit all,” they wrote.
Especially during COVID-19, Williamson said, Duke’s failure to acknowledge equity in its IRPs is a glaring omission.
“Access to basic utilities is a real struggle for hundreds of thousands of households right now,” she said. “Building natural gas power plants that are going to become inoperable within their lifespan risks raising costs drastically for those who are already struggling.”
Decision Lies with the Utilities Commission
Other utilities in the Southeast have faced similar public criticism about how effectively their IRPs address climate goals. In February, the Virginia utilities commission deemed Dominion Energy’s IRP insufficiently clear on how Dominion will comply with the Virginia Clean Economy Act. (See Virginia Grades Dominion IRP Incomplete.) Dominion’s proposed IRP was also unanimously rejected by South Carolina regulators in 2020, leading them to file a new plan last month that models an early retirement of its coal fleet.
In North Carolina, the seven-member Utilities Commission will determine whether Duke can proceed with its IRPs as submitted or if the utility will have to address public concerns. All but one of the commissioners was appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who has spearheaded North Carolina’s climate efforts.
During a technical conference in March, the NCUC heard about Duke’s plans to integrate new technology and automate grid processes to support a future advanced grid. The NCUC has also directed Duke to present in April on how it will increase the distributed energy resource load on the grid. (See NC Looks at Holistic Approach to Planning.)
Whether such actions signal that the NCUC might require Duke to pursue one of its high carbon reduction pathways remains uncertain. The NCUC is not under a deadline for approving the IRPs, according to commission staff.
Meredith Archie, a spokesperson for Duke, says that the utility welcomes increased public interest. “The public hearing gives us an opportunity to hear directly from our customers,” she said. “And we look forward to hearing their thoughts on the IRPs.”
Durham’s Freid hopes the extensive input will persuade the commissioners to send Duke back to the drawing board.
“It would be surprising to me if all of that attention doesn’t change something,” she said. “We hope that it will result in a much more climate-friendly IRP than what has been submitted so far.”
The first release of the Align software platform and ERO Secure Evidence Locker (SEL) went live Wednesday, marking a major milestone in the effort to improve and standardize compliance monitoring and reporting processes across the ERO Enterprise.
Functionality for Release 1 includes allowing registered entities to create and submit self-reports and self-logs through Align, create and manage mitigating activities and mitigation plans, and respond to requests for information, NERC said in a release. The program is in effect for the Midwest Reliability Organization, the Texas Reliability Entity and NERC.
WECC will go live with Release 1 on May 10, and Northeast Power Coordinating Council, ReliabilityFirst and SERC Reliability will join on May 24, according to a training webinar conducted by Texas RE last week. Release 2 includes technical feasibility exceptions, period data submittals, self-certifications and additional needed enhancements identified in Release 1. It will go live for all regions July 19. Release 3, which covers compliance planning and audits, spot checks and complaints, will go live in the fourth quarter.
Align and the SEL will apply only to new cases, so registered entities should continue to process and submit supporting evidence for existing self-reports using their current tools even after Release 1 takes effect in their regions. If those systems require contact information to be on file, then entities should ensure that is kept up to date as well. New cases using the monitoring methods covered in Release 2 and Release 3 will also be managed in existing systems until those updates go live.
Project Delayed for Security Concerns
NERC began the Align project in 2014 as the CMEP (Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program) Technology Project. The rollout date was set for September 2019 but delayed — initially to the third quarter of 2020 — because of concerns about the software vendor’s sale to SAI Global, an Australia-based company whose investors include Baring Private Equity Asia, a Hong Kong-based private equity firm. (See NERC Investigating Chinese Tie to Software Vendor.)
The latest timeline for the rollout of the Align tool and ERO Secure Evidence Locker | Texas RE
The SEL was added to the initial release at the request of registered entities, causing the entire project to be delayed again. NERC conceived the SEL as a way to provide secure storage where potentially sensitive information collected as evidence would be kept separate from work papers managed through the Align tool. For security reasons, the SEL is not part of the main Align tool, and REs are allowed to construct their own lockers for CMEP evidence, provided they meet the reliability and security specifications provided by NERC last year.
The delays increased the project’s price tag by more than $2 million and also pushed some development costs originally budgeted for 2019 into 2020, necessitating a budget variance to be filed with FERC Approves NERC’s Align Spending Request.) Project leaders acknowledged the cost of the program has been higher than expected but expressed confidence that the results will justify the expense.
“The Align project is the most ambitious undertaking that NERC and the regional entities have ever collectively taken on,” said Jim Albright, chair of NERC’s Align Steering Committee and CEO of Texas RE. “Developing and implementing Align took a significant amount of time and effort from stakeholders across the ERO Enterprise, but I am confident that the effort will pay dividends over the coming years through streamlined CMEP reporting.”
The Horse Heaven Hills are a bare brown line of ridges and hills, just south of the Tri-Cities, a small metro area of about 200,000 strung along the Columbia River in Washington state. They run roughly east-west for maybe 15 miles. It is largely wheat farms and some vineyards. No apparent sites are sacred to area tribes. Ferruginous hawks — listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act — cruise around the area.
Wind is a major feature here. Several miles to the northwest on the 3,500-foot-tall unpopulated Rattlesnake Ridge, an anemometer once hit 150 mph. On a recent day, 60-mph winds swept the Tri-Cities, and the anemometer almost hit 100 mph.
In 1992, a wind turbine project was proposed at Rattlesnake Ridge. The locals despised it. The project died the same year.
Fast forward to 2021. Scout Clean Energy of Boulder, Colo., has proposed building up to 224 wind turbines — about 500 feet tall — on 112 square miles of mostly private land in the Horse Heaven Hills. About 294 acres of that land would also hold solar panels. The wind turbines and solar panels are projected to produce 1,150 MW. That’s roughly the same output as the Columbia Generating Station, a commercial nuclear reactor just north of the Tri-Cities.
“We become used to cussing the wind,” Benton County resident Tom Blakeny said at a Tuesday hearing on the proposal. “It’ll be a big change to encourage it to blow.”
If built, the wind project would be the second in Benton County. Richland-based Energy Northwest, which owns and operates Columbia Generating Station, built and operates 63 wind turbines several miles to the southeast of the northern face of the Horse Heaven Hills. Completed in 2007, that site covers about 8 square miles and produces almost 96 MW.
Energy Northwest’s turbines are not controversial, but they cannot be seen from the Tri-Cities. Scout’s turbines would be, a major factor in Benton County residents opposing the project.
Benton County’s government received about 400 phone calls and emails about the project, with about 90% opposing the project, Benton County Commissioner Will McKay said Tuesday. Scout commissioned its own poll of 500 people in December 2020, showing 34% opposing it.
Opposition was also significant, but hard to quantify, at a Tuesday public hearing held by the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) on the project conducted via Skype. Numerous technical problems plagued the hearing, making it difficult to pin down numbers and names. However, the majority of the roughly 40 speakers opposed Scout’s project.
“Scout recognizes this is the first step in a very long process,” said project manager Dave Kobus.
‘Industrial Horizon’
What emerged from Tuesday’s hearing is how differently people view the Horse Heaven Hills. Many Tri-Citians see a stark clean beauty to the hills and ridges. “It’ll rob our region of its scenic beauty,” said Michael Novakovich, president of the Visit TRI-CITIES organization.
A few see a place where landowners are being denied their property rights of being able to lease their land to Scout. Others see wind turbines usurping farmland. The site covers 1.1% of Benton County’s agricultural lands. Others see rare and valuable shrub steppe being threatened.
Labor unions see lots of jobs.
Scout sees a predicted power shortage of 8,000 MW in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana by 2030, with its project contributing to a solution to that shortfall. The company has five wind-and-solar sites in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana and California.
On Tuesday, two Benton County government planners, Greg Wendt and Michelle Cook, testified that the Scout project does not comply with county plans earmarking the area for agricultural use in its long-range land-use planning. Installing wind turbines could change the underground hydrology of the area. And only 44 of the 244 potential turbine spots have been adequately studied for ecological ripple effects, they said.
Meanwhile, Michael Ritter, representing the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said his agency determined that “it will be difficult to almost impossible to mitigate” environmental damages from installing the turbines. He also said it is concerned about the loss of shrub steppe habitat.
A few said that some vineyards and wineries are scattered around the Horse Heaven Hills, with wineries being a major tourism draw for Benton County. State Rep. Mary Dye (R), who represents a district adjacent to Benton County, argued that turbines will affect micro-climates around the vineyards. Wine grapes are finicky and sensitive to unusual temperatures.
Resident John Christian said the turbine threatened the area’s ferruginous hawks. “You cannot construct a kill zone of wind turbines in this area,” he said.
Another resident, Marcus Stauffer, said, “Tourism is big business in our area. … People don’t come to watch a giant industrial horizon.”
Meanwhile, leaders of two construction and electrical worker labor unions — their identities garbled in the glitch-filled Skype hearing — said the turbines would be a big economic boost to the Tri-Cities, including being a tax windfall for local schools and roads. Scout predicted the project would lead to 930 construction jobs and 56 permanent jobs.
Connecticut lawmakers voted Wednesday to advance a billthat would direct the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to create rules for implementing the Transportation and Climate Initiative Program (TCI-P), a legislative priority for Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont.
The General Assembly’s Environment Committee voted along party lines to send the TCI-P bill to the Senate, with Democrats hailing the cap-and-trade program’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by 26% from 2022 to 2032.
The bill also outlines plans for how to invest Connecticut’s proceeds from the auction of emissions allowances. TCI-P is projected to raise up to $89 million starting in 2023, increasing to up to $117 million by 2032. The bill would direct at least 50% of this money to communities overburdened by air pollution or underserved by the transportation system. It also would establish an equity and environmental justice advisory board to counsel DEEP and the Department of Transportation on TCI-P to ensure equitable outcomes.
Sen. Will Haskell (D) said the decline of carbon emissions to historic lows is one of the few silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic and that “it would be a real shame if we decided to just return to the old normal.”
“Let’s not put kids back on those diesel buses that pump exhaust into their lungs,” Haskell said. “Let’s not just accept as fact that urban communities are going to see higher asthma rates, which by the way is not just a moral injustice, but it’s an economic cost for all of us.”
| Shutterstock
Republicans decried TCI-P as a Trojan horse for another gas tax in the form of potential pass-down costs from fuel suppliers to consumers. DEEP analysis shows TCI-P participation could boost gas prices by 5 cents/gallon beginning in 2023, assuming fuel suppliers choose to pass down 100% of allowance costs to consumers. Multiple consumer protection safeguards, including a cost-containment reserve, would kick in at 9 cents/gallon. One Republican said the 5- to 9-cent increase applies to the first year of TCI-P alone, with prices potentially rising by as much as 26 cents.
“I know there’s a lot of schematics to how this bill operates in terms of how the additional revenue comes into the state, but at the end of the day, no matter how we examine it, this is going to be a tax on the consumers,” said Rep. Stephen Harding (R). He conceded that elements of the bill are “critically important” but said increasing gas prices “is not good policy.”
Rep. Patrick Callahan (R) said that Connecticut has the “highest gas tax in New England” and that electric vehicles are cost-prohibitive for many people.
“I have numerous concerns trying to legislate people to behave a certain way,” Callahan said. “What’s next? Are we going to legislate people and tell them not to eat red meat? I just don’t think this is what we should be doing.
Sen. Christine Cohen (D), co-chair of the Environment Committee, said the bill is not intended “to change behavior.” She compared TCI-P to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which she said has been “incredibly successful and a model that we can look to.” After dozens of RGGI auctions, the cost-containment reserve has been triggered only twice, she said.
“That’s really important to recognize: We have the protections in place if they are needed for consumer protection,” Cohen said.
Noting that her rural Litchfield County district includes “a lot of small towns,” Rep. Maria Horn (D) said constituents have no access to robust public transportation and must drive nearly everywhere they go, so they would feel the pinch of rising gas prices. But she expressed hope that the auction’s proceeds will be invested in increased transportation options and have a positive environmental impact.
Reaction
Christian Herb, president of the Connecticut Energy Marketers Association, opposed the bill but was not surprised that it was voted out of committee.
Herb said that with 50% of the allowance proceeds ticketed for the state’s most vulnerable communities, rural districts like Horn’s would be fighting for a smaller pool of funding.
“I think about Rep. Horn, who’s saying up in Litchfield County that she thinks she’s going to get money to build an infrastructure for handicapped people to be able to get on electric buses and that she thinks this is going to increase transportation. I would say that half the money is going to the cities, so you have no access to that,” Herb told NetZero Insider. “I don’t think that helps those rural districts that may be interested in trying to see some money come to their areas to build infrastructure. It seems to me that this has been set up for failure.”
Connecticut Director of the Acadia Center Amy McLean said the clean energy advocacy organization “couldn’t be happier” that the bill advanced, but that there is still plenty of “heavy lifting to do.” McLean said the coalition developed to support the bill needs further nurturing ahead of additional votes. McLean said that moderate Democrats might not support the bill and that environmental justice communities need to be in the mix.
“If they can’t have their own voice in this [process], then we’re not doing it right,” McLean said.
McLean said that the Sierra Club does not support TCI-P because the emissions reductions are too “weak” in addition to issues with equity and environmental justice.
“Sierra Club was true to what they said, and they are not going to be supporting anything that doesn’t have the blessing of environmental justice communities,” she said. “So for us to not have all of those voices at the table makes us a much less effective body.”
Experts from industry, government and academia agree that sound policy is critical in reaching net-zero emissions in the U.S. Opinions on what those policies would look like, however, vary widely.
A group of those experts convened Wednesday to present their ideas on policies for a carbon-free future in a webinar covering four recent reports, hosted by High-Impact Events.
The reports have some common elements, including decarbonizing electricity generation by 2035 and the need to accurately price carbon. They also differ on some issues, such as the amount of capital investment that is needed in the net-zero transition.
Accelerating US Clean Energy
A team of researchers from the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at University of Colorado Boulder released a report in December that looks at solutions for rapid decarbonization by sector.
In their approach, the authors focused on the status of current technologies and their ability to help the U.S. stop burning fossil fuels, said Charles Kutscher, co-author and director of the Buildings and Thermal Systems Center at RASEI.
The report, “Accelerating the U.S. Clean Energy Transformation: Challenges and Solutions,” identifies supporting technologies for achieving the energy transition across electricity generation, buildings, transportation and industry.
An analysis of each sector includes a wide range of policy recommendations, including:
retiring existing coal plants and ending construction of new natural gas-fired generation capacity;
adopting a national building energy/carbon code;
enacting a national moratorium on sales of light- and medium-duty internal combustion vehicles by 2030; and
strengthening federal RD&D efforts for reducing the cost of renewable hydrogen production and hydrogen storage.
The report takes a deep dive into options for removing carbon dioxide from the air to complement net-zero efforts. Kutscher said carbon capture will be as important as emissions reductions in limiting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.
Direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) is among the technologies identified in the report as gaining attention in the sector. Biden’s recently announced infrastructure plan includes an expansion of tax credits that would make it easier to use the credits for DACCS technology. (See Biden Infrastructure Plan Would Boost Clean Energy.)
Pulling carbon out of the air with direct air capture requires passing air through exchange devices and geologically sequestering the carbon dioxide.
At a cost of $100 to $300/metric tonne of CO2, DACCS is the most expensive carbon capture technology reviewed in the report, Kutscher said. The process, he added, should not be deployed where it would compete for power with renewables that are being used to displace fossil fuels.
The report recommended using carbon pricing to help support development of pilot DACCS plants in the U.S.
The Zero-carbon Plan
Put together by the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, America’s Zero Carbon Action Plan (ZCAP) is based on a simple idea: set your goal — a zero-carbon economy by 2050 — and then “backcast” to determine the best options for getting there using a lot of number crunching and computer modeling.
“What’s been missing is a real strategy for transition, particularly for a just transition, and in that regard, we need to focus on job creation,” said Dan Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and one of the nearly 100 academics and experts who worked on the plan. “Our proposal looks in particular at rejuvenation of the heartland of America, of the Appalachian region [and] in the Midwest. This is absolutely essential to not just the reality of delivering deep decarbonization, but to the politics of making this possible.”
Echoing other reports, the ZCAP says getting to zero carbon by 2050 means a massively accelerated ramp-up of both clean power and the electrification of transportation and buildings by 2030. About three and a half times more solar and wind will be needed, while coal-fired generation must drop to less than 1%, said Jamil Farbes, a principal with industry consultants Evolved Energy Research. An additional 20 GW of storage will be needed, but gas generation must stay flat, he said.
Farbes estimated the incremental costs for reaching zero carbon by 2050 at 0.2 to 1.2% of gross domestic product, which is considerably less than historical energy spending as a share of GDP.
The transition to zero carbon will also create about 4 million jobs over the next decade, versus a loss of 304,000 jobs — about 30,000 a year — across all fossil fuels, said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The just transition that will be needed for these workers “includes job guarantees, pension guarantees, income support, retraining support [and] relocations, and this is for each and every person that is going to experience dislocation,” Pollin said.
The cost, he said, will be about $1.5 billion a year up to 2030 and $3.8 billion per year between 2031 and 2050 because of increasing layoffs in the oil and gas industry, “This is less than one-hundredth of 1% of average GDP over this period,” Pollin said.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, was optimistic about the next steps, saying that President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and the Democrats’ CLEAN Future Act now before Congress are well aligned with the ZCAP’s goals and strategy. (See Biden Infrastructure Plan Would Boost Clean Energy.)
“Getting to zero by 2050 requires that all new investment has to be clean as soon as you roll off the old, fossil fuel-based capital stock,” Sachs said. “We’re in a changeover where we are going to be retiring old capital and replacing it with new capital, and we just need to set the timelines so that all new capital coming in is consistent with the 2050 timeline.”
Grassroots Policy
The grassroots volunteer organization Clean Energy for Biden last year compiled 48 policy papers to help legislators identify potential federal decarbonization policies.
Together, the papers present a diverse set of recommendations on everything from infrastructure to finance, to job creation in communities to rebuilding schools, said Zoe Elizabeth, energy service lead at Silicon Valley Clean Energy.
One of the papers, called Energy Efficiency and Demand Flexibility in the Built Environment, identified the important role energy efficiency should continue to have in decarbonizing the economy.
Core recommendations in the paper align with federal jurisdiction and tackle “some of the biggest systemic opportunities for accelerating efficiency given limited time,” said Carmen Best, co-author and director of policy and emerging markets at ReCurve.
Those recommendations include deploying digital tools to make demand flexible and standardizing carbon accounting.
Digital metering infrastructure is key to future energy efficiency measures, but utilities have not leveraged the full value of smart meters yet, according to Best.
“Energy data infrastructure, including tracking and sharing of consumption data, is essential to enable transactions and drive investment in distributed energy resources so we can maximize their value as a grid resource,” she said.
The paper also recommends developing a carbon accounting hub to increase transparency of the carbon intensity of the grid nationwide.
The hub, Best said, would enable buildings and customers to be more responsive to grid conditions.
Another paper, “Policies to Support Cities’ Climate Goals,” targeted opportunities to build out existing federal programs to support decarbonization at the local level, said Nicole Pavia, co-author and senior contributing analyst at Energy Futures Initiative.
The paper focused on sustainable buildings, clean transportation, industrial investments and climate adaptation.
With many U.S. cities requiring commercial buildings to benchmark their energy consumption, the paper suggested the federal government could do more to support and encourage benchmarking efforts nationwide, Pavia said.
The paper further recommended that the federal government develop a voluntary building performance standard that could be adopted easily at the city and town levels.
“The federal government can play an important role here, providing incentives for cities and states to strengthen their building codes, support the move to all electric buildings and assist in the development of stretch codes that exceed state and local mandated codes,” she said.
