The New England Power Pool and the New England States Committee on Electricity (NESCOE) are hiring consultant Peter Flynn, a former National Grid executive, to serve as administrator of the Transition to the Future Grid project.

Flynn, a former senior vice president and deputy general counsel for National Grid, was introduced Tuesday at a joint meeting of the NEPOOL Markets and Reliability committees.

Flynn will report to the committees regularly to ensure the study meets NEPOOL’s and NESCOE’s goals. The study may be outsourced by ISO-NE or conducted by the RTO with assistance from a consultant.

At the joint meeting, Day Pitney attorney Eric Runge presented observations on six past and ongoing studies for their “potential to inform” the Future Grid study. Runge also commented on the proposed scope of the study, which is intended to identify the resource mix needed to meet state climate change goals and gaps in the RTO’s ability to reliably operate the grid under the new conditions.

Carissa Sedlacek, ISO-NE’s director of planning services, also presented the RTO’s preliminary feedback on the 10 study proposals submitted for the Aug. 4 meeting. (See NEPOOL Reviews ‘Future Grid’ Study Requests.)

Straw Proposal

Runge said the next step in the process will likely be development of a straw study proposal presented for stakeholders to debate. He reviewed the objectives, scenarios and modeling used for the 2016 NEPOOL Economic study; the 2019 NESCOE Economic study, as expanded by the Anbaric Development Partners 2019 Economic study; the Massachusetts 2050 Roadmap initiative; Eversource Energy’s “Grid of the Future” study; the “Electric Reliability under Deep Decarbonization” study by Energy+Environmental Economics (E3)/Energy Futures Initiative (EFI); and Brattle Group’s 2019 “Achieving 80% GHG Reduction in New England by 2050” study.

Runge said the NEPOOL, Eversource and E3/EFI analyses seem most consistent with the scope of the Future Grid study.

Some of the data, analysis and assumptions from the Massachusetts 2050 Roadmap study and the Brattle study could help establish assumptions and identify gaps because they seem to focus on how to achieve an end-state goal, although both use modeling tools the RTO lacks, Runge said.

The NESCOE study is more limited in scope and would provide only a part of the analysis and information being sought in the Future Grid study, he added.

10 Proposals

Commenting on the study proposals submitted, Runge said one from National Grid was generally consistent with the scope but has a transmission/storage focus, with a suggestion to use bidirectional, controllable transmission for optimizing energy storage between New England and Québec.

“The Eversource proposal seems like a complete economic and reliability study and [is] consistent with the intended scope of the Future Grid Study,” Runge said. “The modeling tools associated with it [Gridview and GE MARS] are used” by ISO-NE.

[Note: Although NEPOOL rules prohibit quoting speakers at meetings, those quoted in this article approved remarks afterward to clarify their standing on the issues.]

The NESCOE-proposed “pathway” scenario, which would look at the impact of certain electrification assumptions, could work into a larger study as a scenario, he said.

Anbaric’s call for identifying an onshore and offshore power system that is carbon-free by 2035 seems outside the scope of the Future Grid study because it identifies a goal and then studies how to achieve it, Runge said. He said it could inform assumptions or sensitivities to the study, rather than being its focus.

Runge did not make any comments about the American Petroleum Institute’s request to study how the grid will balance policy goals with other reliability, affordability and energy-access objectives.

He said the remaining proposals had limited focuses “that could be worked into a larger study, or potentially could be used as change cases/scenarios/sensitivities”:

• A proposal by Energy Market Advisors on behalf of several public power systems suggested an analysis of how capacity interconnection and minimum interconnections would impact markets and operations. FirstLight Power said the base scenarios should not assume significant new electric storage entry to avoid understating potential reliability problems.
• Multi-Sector Group A (Acadia Center, Advanced Energy Economy, Brookfield Renewables, Conservation Law Foundation, Energy New England, Natural Resources Defense Council and PowerOptions) spotlighted a potential need for ramping, regulation and load-following resources.
• Multi-Sector Group B (Advanced Energy Economy, Borrego Solar, Conservation Law Foundation, Energy New England, ENGIE, Natural Resources Defense Council and PowerOptions) asked for a long-term transmission system assessment to identify investments that could eliminate obstacles to reaching net-zero-carbon emissions.
• NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy jointly requested an analysis of the impact of the loss of NextEra’s Seabrook and Dominion’s Millstone nuclear power plants.

Stakeholder Comments

Anbaric Senior Vice President Theodore Paradise said, “When we were doing our request, we picked 2035 because it fits between the Rhode Island carbon-free goal of 2030 and the Connecticut goal of carbon free by 2040. … The year probably doesn’t matter, though it might for electrification more than for what transmission we think is realistic.”

The request isn’t to do an integrated resource plan, but to figure out if the market and transmission planning rules work to meet state goals, Paradise said. “We need to know what some version of that system looks like. … If the transmission isn’t there, market signals won’t lead to more resources.”

RTO Feedback

Sedlacek said no single modeling platform could provide all the answers requested. She said the RTO does not have a model for projecting Forward Capacity Market clearing and is wary of developing one “because the marketplace may view it as a projection of anticipated market outcomes by the market administrator.”

The Analysis Group has performed FCM price projections for the RTO in the past. Developing study assumptions and modeling parameters typically takes three to six months, and it could take another six to 12 months for the consultant to complete work and provide results. An economic study would likely require use of a probabilistic reliability model such as GE MARS and could be done in about 12 months if done concurrently with the 2020 economic study.

“What I’ve learned over the last two years working on economic studies … is that it’s very difficult to do multiple economic-type studies all at the same time,” Sedlacek said. “There are efficiencies in concentrating on a single study at a time, especially on a topic as complex as the future grid. And the more granular the analysis, the longer it takes.”

“Recall it took us four months to nail down the assumptions for the National Grid study,” she noted.

Projecting ancillary service needs could take at least 15 months because of the need to further develop the Electric Power Enterprise Control System (EPECS) model developed by Dartmouth College, which is a “customized tool that is still in the development stage. It performs the analysis it was designed to do, but additional enhancements are warranted,” Sedlacek said.

She also noted that the RTO generally studies incremental changes to the transmission system rather than the detailed transmission expansion some stakeholders seek.

The RTO’s staff is too small to handle a large design and modeling project while also performing required interconnection and reliability studies, Sedlacek said, and lacks the necessary skills to appropriately estimate transmission costs. Such an analysis, she said, “would be best performed by engineers with relationships with transmission equipment vendors.”

“We would be more than willing to work with ISO-led consultants to conduct this expanded effort once stakeholders have had an opportunity to derive a well defined study scenario,” she said.

If stakeholders agree by November on the modeling assumptions for the Future Grid study, the RTO would need to displace the current 2020 National Grid economic study request to make Future Grid the top priority.

Joe Rossignoli, director of business development for National Grid, said he would like to discuss with the RTO how his company’s study request would be treated upon being delayed, but he added that “we’re good with making way from the resource perspective.”

Pete Fuller of Autumn Lane Energy said, “My concern today is that we know how to study what we know, but not how to study what we don’t know … so, I’m not sure our study will tell us what to do to move toward this new future.”

Sedlacek said the RTO is unaware of any current model that can provide the “detailed, operational dispatch needs of a system with significant inverter-based resources, interaction between the transmission and distribution systems, and evolving load profiles that may occur in the future.” The RTO is beginning work to develop such a model, but it will be “a multiyear effort,” she said.