Experts appearing at the Missouri Energy Initiative’s virtual Midwest Energy Policy Series on Wednesday and Thursday touched on thoughtful infrastructure expansion, cybersecurity and FERC Order 2222.

Infrastructure

GridWise Alliance CEO Karen Wayland said there’s “a lot to like” in President Biden’s recently announced American Jobs Plan, but the infrastructure proposal probably doesn’t go far enough.

The draft package includes $174 billion worth of consumer incentives for electric vehicles; $100 billion for resilient transmission systems, with a goal of 20 GW in new high-voltage transmission lines; another $50 billion to safeguard critical infrastructure, including the grid; and a production tax credit for storage.

Wayland said that while the proposal is investment-heavy in new transmission, it doesn’t include enough grid innovation, like microgrids, to handle multiplying distributed energy resources and the large-scale electrification of buildings and vehicles. Electrified vehicles and buildings should soon be able to provide ancillary services to the grid, she added.

“We’re really grappling with the concept of what does it mean for the grid to be ready to be the platform for all these things that we want it to do,” Wayland said. “We don’t see a big investment in the grid itself in this package.”

Wayland said today’s federal grid investments must be more substantial than the $10 billion in grid spending that was included in the stimulus package during the Great Recession.

“The grid is so much more important now than it was 10, 12 years ago that the scale of investment in the grid itself needs to be larger than it was in the [2009] recovery act,” she said.

She said the grid needs better software, controls and sensors to take advantage of all the services energy storage can provide.

“I think we’re in the decade of storage,” Wayland predicted, pointing to a “striking” 88% decline in the past 10 years in the cost of lithium ion batteries.

“I keep hearing the focus on building new transmission as a way to harness the power of renewables, but we also need to invest in the grid itself because we’ve got to manage how that power flows over the grid, and that’s going to be grid-enhancing technologies,” she said.

Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Green Capital, said clean energy furnishing a steeper demand because of pervasive electrification only works if there’s “a huge amount of storage on the grid connected to a smart, well constructed grid.”

Schub said the American Jobs Plan must include funding and policies for regions already left behind in the clean energy transition. He said the areas include the polluted “fence line” communities next to coal plants and “communities in Wyoming and West Virginia that are being rotted out from the inside — economically speaking — because the markets for coal are evaporating and there are no other job opportunities.”

“And that’s not a trivial concern,” Schub said.

RTO Perspectives

MISO and SPP planners said mid-February’s deep freeze likely has implications for their respective infrastructure buildouts.

SPP Director of System Planning Casey Cathey said transmission congestion in the South had the RTO backing down some generation during the winter event. He said the question remains whether SPP will need to test more extreme winter events for resource adequacy standards or include them in transmission planning.

“We have some transmission assets that are 80 years, 60 years in the ground. And the question is: Do we want to build those types of facilities to be able to mitigate situations such as this event? It gets into risk-based planning, probabilistic planning. There are a lot of things that we could do to help address it, but the question is if the event and when this event happens again, will it be the same resource that will be offline? Will it be the same transmission facilities that are out?” he said.

MISO System Planning Principal Adviser Matthew Tackett said his RTO also faced transmission congestion that hindered power delivery and that more transmission could have prevented some load shed. He said MISO is “looking hard” into whether transmission buildout can assist resource adequacy.

“But you’ve got to look at the risk, the cost, the probability of this happening again. Are there other benefits that transmission can provide?” Tackett told attendees.

He said markets are going to increasingly become weather-driven, not just in terms of reliability during extreme events, but in that weather will determine how much “just-in-time” energy can be generated. MISO will have to rethink historic trends, he said.

Cybersecurity

Federal infrastructure dollars should be reserved for the development of a cybersecurity workforce in the energy industry, Wayland argued.

“The lack of trained cybersecurity workforce in the utility sector is a huge threat,” she said.

“‘Cybersecurity’ has become that scary word,” CyberUp Executive Director Tony Bryan said. “We see it in the news; we read about it all the time. … It really came to a head with SolarWinds and updates and patches and all these other terms and words. … But the reality is there are lots of risk.”

Maryville University cybersecurity instructor Brian Gant said today’s cybersecurity milieu entails more malicious hackers trying to crack larger grids that use more online applications.

“These are some of the same threat actors that have attacked the financial industry or health care for years. And they’re seeing a prime opportunity to go after the energy sector,” Gant said.

Joe Scherrer, of Washington University in St. Louis, said utilities’ operational technology was never designed for security and is “especially vulnerable” to attacks and exploitation.

“It’s going to take a very concerted and deliberate effort to overcome these [challenges],” he said.

Center for Internet Security Phyllis Lee said the energy sector is susceptible to ransomware attacks and utilities must design post-attack recovery plans.

Jason Vigh, of Burns & McDonnell’s consulting arm 1898 and Co., said utilities should insist that their vendors’ software be equipped with encryption, authentication and data validation features.

“If nobody’s asking for it, then the vendors aren’t going to do it,” Vigh said. He urged executives not to think about the price tag of a cybersecurity program, but the cost savings of prevention.

All employees need to be mindful of threats in day-to-day work, he said. “Cybersecurity is no longer one individual’s or one department’s responsibility.”

Vigh also said energy companies shouldn’t be the proprietors of cybersecurity measures and should collaborate on what protections work.

“I know that there’s a lot of competition in this industry. … There’s a time for competition and then there’s a time for teamwork across an industry. … Although there’s money to be made in cybersecurity, we need to do the right thing,” he said.

Order 2222

Arkansas Public Service Commission Chairman Ted Thomas said FERC’s Order 2222 — which admits distributed resource aggregators into RTO markets — also demands infrastructure development so RTOs can communicate with distribution utilities.

“It’s like laying out a highway system, not entirely knowing what the traffic patterns will be, but knowing if there is no highway system, there will be no traffic at all,” Thomas said.

Former FERC Commissioner Tony Clark, now senior adviser with Wilkinson Barker Knauer, predicted a jump in end-use costs in order for RTOs to implement Order 2222 properly.

“Whatever happens on the distribution side of the grid … it has to be visible to the grid operator; it has to be predictable for the grid operator; and it has to be in some way controllable,” Clark said.

Thomas said that while implementation costs are ultimately borne by the consumer, the expense can be justified through the benefits of bringing DERs into aggregations.

“To me the cost is worth it because it opens up the technological possibilities that will hopefully avoid even more costly carbon mitigation,” he said.

Thomas also warned that bickering over state-versus-federal jurisdiction in the course of Order 2222 implementation can hobble a response to the climate crisis.

“The question of who decides can itself become a barrier to technology, because you get a decision and you fight over whether the decision was lawful or not because of who decided,” he said.