New England states have long-term clean energy and decarbonization goals and mandates. They will require extensive electrification of the transportation and heating sectors, boosted by renewable resources and emerging grid-scale technologies from existing developers and new entrants in the wholesale markets administered by ISO-NE.
In October 2020, the states also shared their collective vision of the future regional grid through the New England States Committee on Electricity (NESCOE), replete with significant changes in market design, transmission system planning, and governance of the RTO. For their part, ISO-NE and NEPOOL stakeholders have Future Grid efforts to explore potential pathways forward to ensure a reliable and efficient clean-energy grid in light of state energy and environmental laws.
Last week at the annual New England Energy Conference and Exposition, hosted by the Connecticut Power and Energy Society and the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association, panelists discussed the convergence of these issues and paths forward during “Now is the Moment: Envisioning the New England Power System.”
Carissa Sedlacek, director of planning services at ISO-NE, said the RTO would perform Phase 1 of the Future Grid Reliability Study as the 2021 Economic Study for NEPOOL. The study will look at 34 different scenarios and go beyond the RTO’s traditional 10-year planning horizon. It will also analyze “bookend” scenarios of various resource buildouts and provide insight into the reliability impact of a system with a significant amount of renewable generation. Preliminary results such as production costs for initial scenarios are expected in June.
“Because none of us have a crystal ball, we have no idea what the future is going to hold, but by doing all of these different scenarios, hopefully we’ll have some bookend results that will influence future policy and future buildout of the system,” Sedlacek said.
Additionally, the Pathways to the Future Grid process will identify, explore and evaluate potential market frameworks that may help support the evolution of a power grid reflective of states’ policies. The 2050 Transmission Study, in support of the NESCOE vision statement, helps states determine how to expand the system to incorporate wind, hydro and distributed energy resources.
“All of these studies will influence, and give us information, that can help shape state policies, federal policies, and also inform stakeholders as they consider how to build their portfolios to participate in the New England markets,” Sedlacek said.
Seeing Both Sides
Ben D’Antonio, formerly with NESCOE as an attorney and analyst specializing in the interactions between public policies and wholesale electricity markets, helped craft scenarios that are part of the Phase 1 study. In April, D’Antonio joined Eversource Energy as its manager of transmission strategy and economic analysis. The region’s largest utility has a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030.
D’Antonio said decarbonizing the entire economy is a “challenging and complex thing to do.”
“There are lots of folks trying to take a look at what economy-wide decarbonization might look like, and I think that several studies show relatively directionally consistent outcomes,” D’Antonio said. “To achieve economy-wide decarbonization, we’re going to have to electrify the heating and transportation sectors. We’re going to need to change the resource mix in New England so that the electric sector can dramatically reduce its emissions profile. To do all that, we’ll probably need some additional transmission and a modern grid to continue to operate the system reliably, and it’s a very different future.”
D’Antonio said that electrification increases demand by 65% in the next 30 years. He added that balancing resources will be needed to reduce curtailment from some renewables and optimize system emissions.
“I don’t think we want to curtail renewables so that we can put on a fossil thermal unit if we can avoid it,” D’Antonio said. “We’re probably going to need some kind of multiday dispatchable resource mix, and we don’t know if that’s going to be some component of storage, some component of thermal resources like we have, or maybe some other things that we’re going to probably need in this future system of ours.”
Market Barriers
Sam Lines, East Coast markets director for Able Grid Energy Solutions, said his company is a developer of standalone energy storage projects, mostly at transmission scale, including a 250-MW project that cleared the 15th Forward Capacity Auction. Lines said battery technology is “changing incredibly quickly,” but there are “barriers to projects getting in the ground,” including ISO-NE’s minimum offer price rule (MOPR), which “potentially prevents batteries and other resources from clearing in that market and getting a share of their revenues.”
Michelle Gardner, senior director of regulatory affairs in the Northeast for NextEra Energy, said there are “some pretty massive changes coming policy-wise.”
“We’ve had kind of a decades-long conflict looking at state public policies and our competitive markets, and I think a lot of us that have been following these issues are seeing that coming to a climax,” Gardner said. “Those market impacts are going to be quite significant in terms of both exit and entry from the market.”
Gardner said impacts from any change or elimination of the MOPR would be significant.
“Taking MOPR off the table allows you to have a little bit of a more robust discussion on some of this,” Gardner said. “From a state perspective, they want the ability to look at both new and existing resources and make decisions about what they want.”
Carbon Free by 2050?
The panelists were asked whether New England’s electric grid will produce 100% carbon-free power by 2050.
“We’ll do a lot of scenarios and a lot of assessments to figure it out,” Sedlacek said. “I like the idea of planning to be 100% carbon-free for 2050 with the hope that we can.”
Gardner said she is “105%” sure and that “it’s going to happen sooner than we think.”
Lines said, “Getting to 98% and 99% will happen much quicker than people realize,” and the remaining gap could be covered by advancements in technology.
“People have consistently, materially underestimated technology advancements,” Lines said. “I don’t think we know what exact technology it’s going to be that covers that last gap, but we can’t underestimate how quickly technology is advancing, and certain technologies are gaining that scale and coming into the money. I think we’re going to close that gap with a combination that we may not be thinking of right now.”
D’Antonio said from an economy-wide perspective, “it’s hard to decarbonize fully.”
“I think up to 80%, people have a general idea of how to do that, but once you get past 80%, wringing out those last CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions out of the broader economy is very expensive and quite difficult,” D’Antonio said. “I just don’t know how we’re going to get to that last part, and all the analysis I’ve seen says getting to 100% is going to require some kind of active measure to take carbon out of the air. So, getting out the very last piece is pretty difficult. I hope Michelle’s right.”