The Western Electricity Coordinating Council took a step further into its new role as a resource adequacy monitor for the Western Interconnection after its Board of Directors approved a resolution Wednesday listing the risk factors WECC plans to prioritize in the coming years.

The West is experiencing “unprecedented change,” with the switch from coal and nuclear to wind and solar and disasters such as California’s wildfires, WECC said in a report accompanying the resolution.

“As you’re well aware, the topic of resource adequacy has gotten a lot of attention over the last several months and for good reason as we continue to see major baseload resources announcing retirements and as we continue to see more and more inverter-based, weather-dependent resources coming online,” WECC Vice President of Reliability Planning Branden Sudduth told the board. “This topic is going to remain at the forefront of reliability conversations.”

The priorities adopted by the board include resource adequacy, a changing resource mix, “extreme natural events” and the impacts to the grid of distributed energy resources and behind-the-meter storage.

A reliability workshop held in Seattle in February and a subsequent board workshop helped shape the list, Sudduth said. (See WECC Should Keep it Regional, Stakeholders Say.) The Seattle session also led to the launch of WECC’s Resource Adequacy Forum on June. 11. (See WECC Seeks to ‘Invent’ Future with RA Forum.)

“WECC used the outcomes of the reliability workshop to create four near-term priorities,” the report said. “These issues have a unique impact [on] or importance to the Western Interconnection, or show areas in which WECC can make a material contribution and on which it should focus over the next few years.”

In addition, WECC’s Member Advisory Committee (MAC) created a Resource Adequacy Work Group (RAWG) to examine RA issues.

WECC has been trying to revamp its approach to reliability risks, becoming more proactive and addressing issues unique to the West.

Resource adequacy hasn’t been a major topic for WECC but should be now in order “to add more value” for its Western stakeholders, Sudduth said. Its wide authority across the Western Interconnection — stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and encompassing two Canadian provinces and a small part of Mexico — places it in a unique position to oversee the tightening resource mix in the West.

WECC already gathers data on resources that it shares with NERC and can expand into its own RA role, Sudduth said. “We see this as an opportunity for us to share our expertise and our tools with those more broadly in the Western Interconnection.”

“At the February workshop, many groups discussed the unique natural events that occur in the West,” the report said. “While many other regions around the country focus on system resilience to events like hurricanes, the West has unique risks like droughts, wildfires and earthquakes.”

The coronavirus pandemic was a kind of natural disaster that could offer lessons for future outbreaks, Sudduth said.

“Although the operational challenges associated with the COVID-19 global pandemic are not unique to the West, it has become clear that further study, planning and sharing of best practices related to pandemics is critical for the reliability and security of the Interconnection,” the report said.

“Additionally, in regions with high penetrations of solar generation, capacity shortfalls are likely to occur in the hours after the peak demand, which makes traditional methods of determining resource adequacy insufficient,” it said.

WECC wants to move beyond its current role advising NERC on long-term resource adequacy (LTRA) and make its own assessments, Sudduth said.

“We will be developing our own standalone WECC resource adequacy assessment to supplement the work we’re doing and the information that’s being provided in the NERC LTRA,” he told the board. “That is one of the major work products we plan on developing going forward”

NERC’s LTRA “informs industry planners and operators, regulators and policymakers of NERC’s view on potential risks,” the report said. “The MAC found that the report is being used by others to support other regulatory activities, and the committee expressed a concern that the LTRA is not accurately representing resource projections in the Western Interconnection.”

The MAC assigned the following goals to the RAWG, according to the report: “Evaluate the LTRA data collection process and make recommendations for improvements” and “evaluate Western Interconnection resource adequacy work more generally, including how studies could be better designed, coordinated and communicated to inform public policy decisions.

“This work will be done from a big-picture, policy perspective,” the report said. “The work group will not duplicate current work or create new levels of oversight or review.”

The report said that “collaboration of the RAWG and WECC staff has yielded early results. WECC staff will maintain control of its part of the LTRA but has offered to request more in-depth analysis by subregion and provide more carefully worded summary statements.

“WECC staff has announced that it will produce a resource adequacy document that includes the Western Interconnection portion of the LTRA, and additional scenario analysis and narrative, to provide context for resource adequacy conclusions and address policy initiatives,” the report said. “The RAWG has agreed to work with WECC staff on the scope and look of that document and to help get input from and distribute communication to a broad set of stakeholders.”

Board Candidates Selected

In a report on WECC’s Nominating Committee activities, board member Shelley Longmuir said the committee has decided on three nominees, including two incumbent board members and one new nominee, to fill board seats.

Two current directors, Ian McKay and Richard Woodward, have terms ending this year, Longmuir said. There’s also a vacancy created by the early retirement in December 2019 of board member Michael Core.

The Nominating Committee recommended that McKay and Woodward be reelected and, after an extensive search, selected Dan Arvizu, the chancellor of the New Mexico State University (NMSU) System, to fill the vacant seat, she told the board.

Arvizu, Longmuir said, has had a “long distinguished career” in advanced energy research and development, starting at Bell Labs in 1973 and working for two decades at Sandia National Laboratories, including 14 years in executive positions. He served as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., and was appointed by two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation.

Arvizu holds a PhD from Stanford University.

The WECC board doesn’t approve the selection of nominees, Longmuir said. The Nominating Committee selects candidates and WECC member entities vote. She asked that the elections take place as soon as possible.

Annual Meeting Online

WECC’s annual meeting in September will be virtual, after the board approved a recommendation from CEO Melanie Frye to avoid an in-person gathering.

A rising number of COVID-19 cases in reopening states and the likelihood that WECC member companies will maintain travel restrictions makes an online meeting more practical, she said. Wednesday’s board meeting was held online.

“My recommendation would be that we consider moving this to a virtual meeting, much as we’ve done here today, and then work to identify ways to make the annual meeting as valuable as possible,” Frye said.

The WECC directors agreed unanimously.

“I know we’re all looking forward to the day when we can actually meet again in person, but that day is not here yet,” Board Chair Kristine Hafner said.