With Texas still reeling from the impact of widespread power failures, electricity industry experts this week discussed how the Midwest’s grid can fully decarbonize while dodging the worst effects of increasingly common extreme weather events.

The Smart Electric Power Alliance’s Grid Evolution Midwest virtual conference Feb. 22-23 focused on the path to a carbon-free power system in the Midwest. Panelists zeroed in on how intensifying climate events can complicate the process.

Worsening Weather

Michigan Public Service Commission Chair Dan Scripps said the Midwest energy transition is being driven by forces that are “difficult to put back in the bottle,” including technological advancements, declining energy prices and increased customer participation. The realities of climate change in the South in the last few weeks are rightly causing increased scrutiny on the “core functions of the grid,” he said.

“This winter’s been tough,” he said.

Texas’ prolonged blackouts following a massive winter storm were top of mind for other panelists. (See With Crisis Behind it, ERCOT Now Faces the Music.)

“As we see the grid stressed by weather, these extreme weather events, it heightens our focus … on the need to transition more fully to two-way power flows on this grid that was designed to be a one-way power flow grid,” said Veronica Gomez, senior vice president and general counsel at Commonwealth Edison.

Carlos Restrepo, chief technical officer and managing director at Sonnen Inc., said the Midwest’s renewable changeover is happening alongside new weather patterns, neglected infrastructure and increasing load from electrification.

“It’s putting us in a position where we have to figure out what do we do,” Restrepo said. “Our infrastructure is not getting any younger.”

Restrepo said solar and wind generation paired with storage will create a more balanced grid, where energy is available when extreme weather events “fracture” the grid and its ability to distribute power.

He said the Midwest needs new, forward-thinking regulations that are technology “enablers” instead of “stoppers.”

Basic Fixes First

Gomez said the grid is in need of “nuts and bolts, meat and potatoes” investments like swapping wooden poles for steel ones. Sometimes policymakers fixate on the grid of the future, she said, and forget about “old-fashioned” improvements.

“You can’t forget about the basics either,” she said.

Great Plains Institute CEO Rolf Nordstrom said grid modernization is a “prerequisite” to reach a decarbonized system.

“The system is very, very old. People joke that it’s recognizable by Edison, at least in parts. If we’re going to transition this legacy system from one-way flow and one-way movement of information to a multidirectional flow of both data and electricity, and we’re going to deploy all these distributed resources, from electric vehicles, to storage, to you-name-it … you don’t get to do that without modernizing the system,” he said.

However, he said he is now hopeful for a “bipartisan push” from the federal government to invest in grid infrastructure.

“The kind of extreme weather that we were just witnessing in this past week. I mean, everything we see suggests that this is going to become more common. And you know, that’s on both ends. It’s wildfires in California and floods in other parts of the country like the Midwest,” Nordstrom said. “We can expect it to be more chaotic. … It’s clearly playing out this way in Texas.”

He said the warming climate puts pressure on utilities’ core responsibilities, where “safety, reliability and affordability” are all under threat.

Nordstrom said in the aftermath of the Texas event, some have “played fast and loose” with the facts and blamed renewable generation.

“The vast majority of the challenges were actually with thermal plants and much more conventional forms of energy. … The mischief with the facts just complicates taking an evidence-based approach,” he said.

Minnesota Power Manager of Regulatory Strategy and Policy Jennifer Peterson pointed out that her service territory in early 2019 recorded a punishing -56 degrees Fahrenheit temperature.

Peterson said navigating the chill involved all the demand response her utility could muster, ranging from curtailing industrial iron mines to residential customers switching from furnaces to their woodburning stoves for heat.

“I think the key going forward is to have a number of tools, whether that’s dynamic pricing to send the right signals [or] emergency curtailable products like demand response. I think the utility will need flexibility on a number of fronts to manage the system as it becomes more dynamic and we experience more pressure from increasing weather events,” she said. She added that the grid is no longer going to revolve around “large capital investments” resulting in “large kilowatt-hours.”

Reinforcements at What Cost?

Nordstrom said while grid planners can design the system to withstand a host of weather challenges, that can get expensive. It remains to be seen how much companies are willing to invest in resilience and how much consumers are willing to pay for electricity with more built-in risk management, he said.

“I think it’s challenging,” he said. “If you’re used to a world where the future is predicated on the past, we’ve left that world. Just how much do you invest to protect against the extremes, knowing that they’re going to be more frequent?”

Nordstrom said the industry has left unanswered how it plans to decarbonize its natural gas sector.

“We’ve spent so much time on the electric sector and thinking about what decarbonizing that looks like. We’ve spent really relatively little time thinking about how you decarbonize natural gas and how you decarbonize heating,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s easy in electricity, but I think we at least have a line of sight for what it looks like to decarbonize the system at least 80% or more. We don’t have the same clarity or line of sight for what it looks like to decarbonize natural gas. Yet.”

Nordstrom said the natural gas sector so far only offers partial decarbonization solutions like renewable natural gas and hydrogen technologies. He said part of the problem is that some stakeholders want a full decarbonization policy instead of supporting “cul-de-sacs” that help but aren’t 100% effective.

Xcel Energy’s 2050 decarbonization goal doesn’t include its natural gas system, according to Sydnie Lieb, the utility’s energy and environmental policy manager. But the utility is taking steps to address natural gas, filing with Minnesota state regulators to introduce an electric water heater flexible load pilot project, she said.

Lieb also said customers will inevitably see increased bills in the clean energy transition.

But Fresh Energy Lead Director of Energy Transition Margaret Cherne-Hendrick said utilities and regulators should work to keep bills affordable in the throes of a clean energy conversion.

“We don’t think this transition will be on the backs of individual ratepayers, individual businesses,” she said. “This transition will be done through regulations and financing.”

Audrey Partridge, regulatory policy manager at the Center for Energy and Environment, said it’s unrealistic to stay with a regulatory style that pits renewable resources against “$2[/MMBtu] natural gas.”

“As long as we have that framework, there’s going to be a challenge,” she said.

Partridge said the pandemic offers an opportunity to create a more equitable decarbonization and rethink rate structures. “We’ve seen it at the end of economic downturns,” she said. “I believe we’ll see it at the end of COVID-19.”

Wisconsin Public Service Commission Chair Rebecca Cameron Valcq said the situation in ERCOT lays bare the importance of the deceptively simple task of balancing load and generation at all times.

“For the last 100-plus years, we all got really comfortable with a very, very set way of generating, transmitting and consuming our energy,” Cameron Valcq said. “And those three things are in a period of such rapid change that I think all of us as regulators have to keep reminding ourselves that as the technology is advancing, as the way energy is consumed is changing, we have to make sure what we’re always keeping an eye on is: are the load and generation continuing to be in balance?”

“We can all see to 80% reduction,” Cameron Valcq said, but it’s the last 20% increment that will be the largest challenge and require the most technology and innovation.

Cameron Valcq said regulators should send signals to utilities that cost recovery will be possible for technologies to facilitate the transition to zero carbon.

She also said doubling down on energy efficiency will help the industry inch toward full decarbonization more quickly.

“We only need to see what’s happening in Texas to understand that we cannot afford to put all of our eggs in one basket,” she said. “We have to remember this is an ‘all of the above’ situation.”

Gomez said ComEd’s power supply is already carbon-free 94% of the hours of the year. She acknowledged that much of the clean power is sourced from nuclear plants. ComEd’s challenge is getting that “last, difficult 6%” obtained from clean resources, she said.