Western states and utilities must work more closely to prevent capacity shortfalls and head off the type of energy crisis that roiled the region 20 years ago.

Those were the key takeaways from a webinar Friday that explored resource adequacy issues in the West and the benefits and challenges of a large-scale program that could promote the sharing and coordination of resources across the Western Interconnection.

The webinar was the last in a series of spring panel discussions hosted by the Committee on Regional Electric Power Cooperation (CREPC) and the Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Body (WIRAB).

Branden Sudduth, WECC vice president for reliability planning and performance analysis, started the session with a briefing on WECC’s findings in its December report and subsequent subregional reports on Western resource adequacy. (See Western RA Planning Must Change, WECC Says.)

The analyses found potential resource deficiencies, particularly in Southern California but also in the Desert Southwest and in the Northwest Power Pool footprint under strained system conditions. (See Southern Calif. Could Fail RA Test, WECC Says and SW Faces RA Shortfall in 2021 and Beyond, WECC Says.)

“This demand at-risk issue is not unique to California,” Sudduth said. “Under certain scenarios, all of the subregions that we studied show the risk of not being able to serve load at all times.”

California’s rolling blackouts in August and energy emergencies in September during severe Western heat waves highlighted the supply-and-demand problems facing the West as states transition from fossil fuels to variable renewable resources, such as wind and solar, under hotter, drier conditions.

“At the times of high demand across the entire West, and during times when resource variability is high, each subregion may be struggling to serve its own load and may have limited means to help its neighbors, as we saw during the August 2020 heat-wave event,” Sudduth said.

A standard 15% planning reserve margin is no longer sufficient, WECC found. Reserve requirements ranged from 9% to 42% in extreme cases, he said.

“The variability observed here is both a function of demand and resource availability, but resource availability is the primary driver,” he said.

WECC’s Western Assessment for Resource Adequacy concluded that “planning entities need to coordinate with their neighbors to assure that they’re not counting on imports that may not be available,” Sudduth said.

“The challenges that we face with the changing resource mix and future extreme weather events are too big for any state or utility to solve on their own.”

In addition, he said, “resource planning efforts, including the tools and metrics that we use, need to be updated to account for resource variability. Simply looking at the peak hour and assuming there’s enough capacity to cover load during the hour alone won’t help us to resolve some of the resource challenges that we’ll be facing in the future.”

NWPP RA Effort

Three other panelists built on the theme of regional cooperation to head off capacity shortfalls, citing the Northwest Power Pool’s proposed RA program to be developed by SPP. (See SPP to Develop NWPP Resource Adequacy Program.)

“We all know why this is happening,” said Susan Ackerman, a former member of the Oregon Public Utility Commission and now chief energy officer at the Eugene Water and Electric Board. “This is because we are retiring traditional thermal plants, mostly coal plants, and we are adding to our resource mix a great amount of variable renewable resources, and that means that our capacity is running shy.”

The Pacific Northwest, with its abundance of hydroelectric generation, has not had to worry about sufficient capacity “because it was always just there, but we do have to worry about it now,” Ackerman said.

Without a Western RA program, “we have no common planning standard in the region,” she said. With changing conditions, “we no longer have a good feel for what (capacity) is actually in the market and how deep that is.”

Regional RA planning and coordination would provide reliability benefits, especially under strained system conditions, she said.

“We’re also looking for cost savings,” Ackerman said. “How do you use the great diversity that the [Western] footprint has, both in terms of supply and demand, that we can reduce the cost of keeping the system reliable?”

“My third favorite point is to improve the visibility and coordination of the system,” she said. “We really want to be in a situation where you have enough data so that you are not under-investing in resources … [or] over-investing in resources, and that’s what improved reliability coordination will get for us.”

The NWPP proposal includes a “forward-showing program,” requiring members to demonstrate months in advance that they can meet peak summer and winter loads, she said.

“We have two [peak] seasons in the West that we’re trying to cover … so we’ve got two seasons binding our hands,” Ackerman said. “The belief is that the forward-program … takes us a long way towards ensuring there are reliability benefits from the program.”

California and the Southwest peak in the summer, while the Pacific Northwest peaks in winter and summer. The Pacific Northwest has hydroelectric resources, including in the summer; the Southwest has solar power in abundance, even in winter.

“We can use that diversity in load resources and access to pool resources during the operational timeframe, which we consider to be the day-ahead and the real-time market, to operate in a more cost-effective way for consumers,” she said.

The NWPP RA program is holding a webinar on May 14 to discuss proposed governance structures.

“We need a program that’s resilient and transparent and can effectively adapt through the next few decades … so that it isn’t facing constant second guessing in state capitols,” Oregon PUC Commissioner Letha Tawney said.

Tawney urged her fellow state utility regulators to “engage and think through what [a regional RA program] means in terms of giving up that local control of the RA target and how resources are counted towards that.”

Steve Wright, general manager of the Chelan County (Washington) Public Utility District, gave a detailed history lesson on cooperation and coordination efforts in the Northwest and between the Northwest and California. Those efforts have sometimes succeeded, as in the establishment of the California-Oregon transmission interties, and at other times failed, as in a series of failed efforts to form a Western RTO.

Wright, too, encouraged greater cooperation. The resource adequacy situation facing the West could cause a repeat of the Western energy crisis of 2001 if not avoided, he warned. That crisis caused serious harm to utilities and the customers they serve, he said.

“The problems that we’re dealing with are very similar to the ones that led to the energy crisis, in that it was a fundamental supply-and-demand problem,” Wright said.

“We just can’t let that happen again.”