RTO officials, stakeholders and academics discussed the challenges of operating a grid with increasing renewables and uncertainty at MISO’s three-day Market Symposium last week. Here’s some of what we heard.

Removing Barriers, Accepting Regional Differences

FERC Commissioner Richard Glick, speaking with Richard Doying, MISO’s executive vice president of market and grid strategy, said the commission has done much in the last decade to remove barriers to entry for new technologies, noting its rulemakings in Order 764 (intermittent generation), Order 841 (electric storage), Order 845 (demand response) and Order 2222 (aggregation of distributed energy resources).

“But there’s more to do, for instance, on hybrid technologies,” he said, noting the commission’s technical conference on the subject in July. (See Hybrid Resource Developers Ask for Uniform Rules.)

On Tuesday, the commission will hold a technical conference on offshore wind. “I think there’s a lot we can do in terms of transmission development and transmission planning to figure out if there are any barriers to the development of transmission systems that would enable a significant number of offshore wind farms to be developed” on the East Coast, he said.

Glick also commented on the commission’s tradition of letting grid operators in different regions adopt tailored approaches to compliance with FERC’s rulemakings, joking, “I wish I had a dime for every time I hear, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’

“I think it’s important for the commission to continue to allow RTOs … the flexibility they need,” he said. “I would say it’s still important that we have a baseline,” he added. “We need to … make sure that the goal is achieved.”

360-degree Review for RTOs

Lisa Barton, American Electric Power’s executive vice president for utilities, joined MISO Chief Operating Officer Clair Moeller on Wednesday for a discussion about seams coordination and right-sizing infrastructure investments.

Asked how MISO could improve its seams management, Barton said the RTO should engage in a lessons-learned exercise with its neighboring RTOs and subject itself to a 360-degree review by regulators, industry and other stakeholders: “What are we doing well? What do we need to work on? What … would help move the ball from a seams standpoint?”

Barton said other stakeholders should subject themselves to a similar review. Individual stakeholders “don’t always behave as well as we should either. … We can be self-interested. But this is an industry that must be about the customers. It must be about the communities,” she said.

“I think if there’s one thing we know about the future, it’s got to be about decarbonizing. … If we can accelerate the transformation … to electric vehicles, think about what that does for the industry. Think about what that does for the environment. There’s so many good things associated with that.”

Moeller agreed. “There’s something for everybody if we all pull together. … When we wander into the parochial — ‘my interest is more important than everybody else’s interests’ — we tend to get into trouble.”

While the industry excels at responding to hurricanes and other crises, Barton said, it needs to become more proactive and shouldn’t worry so much about overbuilding.

“I hear that from economists quite a bit. ‘Well, there might be 5% of capacity in that transmission line that’s not used.’ That’s OK. We shouldn’t be afraid of that,” she said. “What we should be afraid of is having load-shed events [and] not having sufficient resource adequacy. … That’s when you cannot have electric vehicles be a part of your future and a part of the solution.”

“I ask people occasionally, ‘Which mistake would you like to make: the one where you build a little too much a little too early, or the ones where you didn’t build enough?’” Moeller responded. “The ramifications of those two mistakes are dramatically different.”

Moeller said he believes a growing “coalition of the willing” is in favor of an “interstate highway sort of grid” to facilitate the kind of energy transfers that allowed MISO to maintain reliability during its last polar vortex.

“We had a 25% forced outage rate on every resource: coal, gas, demand-side management, wind. You guys in PJM were kind enough to send us 19,000 MW an hour for about six hours, which for us was the difference between load shed and not load shed. …

“I think we need to find a way to value that [resilience] so it shows up in a business case, so we can make the investments we need to make the future safe and affordable,” he added.

Jay Caspary, vice president of consulting firm Grid Strategies, had a similar take in a session moderated by Jennifer Curran, MISO vice president of system planning and chief compliance officer, on “Infrastructure as an Enabler.”

“One of the benefits I think we have in the near term is there’s a lot of assets that are reaching their end of life. I think if we started working with our neighbors, we can identify some key [transmission] corridors and target those in our regional and interregional plans and move forward,” Caspary said.

“You know, when [President Dwight] Eisenhower [proposed] the interstate highway system in 1955, it took decades for that to come into fruition. And it had to evolve as things changed, and spurs were added and toll roads [were added] to make the traffic flows efficient around metropolitan areas. I think we need something like that that we can all buy into.”

Macrogrid or Microgrid?

“It’s fashionable in some circles to say the big grid is going to go away. I doubt that that is the case,” said Anjan Bose, regents professor at Washington State University. “As long as there is going to be cheaper generation resources like wind somewhere in the country and a lack of it in other areas, we are going to see the need for transmission. But I do want to emphasize that the microgrid concept — the fact that there are a lot of technologies coming in [at] the edge of the grid — is not going to go away, and it will probably speed up. The question is, how do we work that into planning, and how do we make sure we take advantage of these microgrids?”

Planning Challenges

“The need to plan for extreme events … has always been difficult because of the infrequency at which they occur. So instead, we plan to the standard reliability criteria: N-1 or N-1-1, maybe N-2. And extreme events which may be N-K — where K is a very large number — don’t get that much attention,” said James McCalley, a professor in electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University. “Yet it is clear that we may be seeing more frequent occurrences of hurricanes, floods, wildfires — and being from Iowa, I’m very sensitive to derecho, the straight-line winds that we had recently here in my state.”

Bose questioned whether the kind of probabilistic methods used in planning would be applicable for operations.

“In planning, we tend to take into account the probability of these occurrences. The question in my mind is: Are those same tools good enough in the operations area, or even applicable in the operations area?

“In operations, we are not using probabilistic methods to determine how probable the region is to overload or under-voltages or whatever. We use very deterministic methods, meaning we say, ‘Well, if this happens, then we will be able to survive it. Or if this happens, we’ll really have a problem over in this part of the grid.”

Planning is also more difficult because there are “so many different objectives to be taken care of,” he continued.

“The reliability criteria are getting more difficult to find out what they actually mean. … In California, for example, where we ran out of resources [and were forced into load shedding in August], the question really was: Is the loss of wind an N-1 contingency, and should we be putting that into our studies?”

Although NERC reliability standards currently have no metrics for measuring resilience, “it’s obviously going to come,” with the risk of forest fires, earthquakes and derechos to be considered in some regions, he said. “That has to be translated into mathematics and the tools that we have.”

Julian Leslie, head of networks for National Grid Electricity System Operator in the U.K., said grid operators need data and input about stakeholders’ visions of the future to ensure they build the right tools for managing operations.

“I never thought working for a transmission system operator [that] I’d be talking to electric vehicle manufacturers or Google [and Amazon] and people like that just to really understand what their direction is, what is their future strategy.”

McCalley called for increasing “the dimensionality of the solution space — that’s a complicated way of saying we need more ways to solve our problems.”

He suggested voltage source converter-based HVDC technology and making better use of demand response. (See related story, MISO Seeks Rx for Increased Uncertainty.)

It also means tapping into the control capability of wind. “They have inertia. They have control capability,” McCalley said. “Let’s use it.”

Gathering Data

Bose acknowledged complaints that the research community has not been getting the data needed to be able to do proper studies. “But I think [the Department of Energy] and others are now trying to get enough synthetic data on which research can be done, which doesn’t expose [the] sensitivity of actual transmission data.

“The bigger problem in my mind is the power companies getting the data that they need to do their planning work. This is a serious [problem], especially on the Eastern Interconnection where data exchanges have been somewhat limited.

“I think this needs to be looked at from an industry point of view and a national security point of view as to how this data can be kept so that everybody — all the power companies — can do legitimate work on the expansion planning. … All the data exchanges that take place today is done by bilateral agreements. This is ridiculous because you know there are 18,000 power companies in the country. So, there need to be agreements that are countrywide. That needs to happen so that this data is available. As to what data is needed, that depends on the tools we have [and] on what we are trying to solve.”

Caspary said the industry is good at sharing operational data. “When it gets to planning data, we share models, but we really don’t get into the actual performance characteristics of the components in the system. I would be particularly interested in the remaining life that’s being projected on assets and how we would … project the availability of those assets and the mean time to failure.”

Current models assume every asset has the same probability of failure, he said. “I just don’t think that’s a very smart way of planning the system.”