SAN DIEGO — Struggling with a changing landscape of rooftop solar, electric vehicles and Western regionalization, transmission planners voiced their thoughts about an increasingly decentralized grid at Infocast’s 10th Annual Transmission Summit West last week.

“We’re conducting a paradigm shift here. It is not easy to perform transmission planning anymore,” said Bhaskar Ray, a distribution expert with Burns & McDonnell in San Francisco.

Ray sat on one of a dozen panels at the three-day summit, with about 100 in attendance. Speakers addressed topics such as the impacts of community choice aggregation, non-wires alternatives (NWAs) and distributed energy resources.

The overarching theme was a changing market driven by millions of rooftop solar panels and a dramatic increase in the use of EVs, especially in California. The state’s efforts to use 100% clean energy, to create a Western RTO and to spread its energy policies across the West were high on the list of concerns.

“It causes us small heart attacks” when we hear Californians say they are exporting their energy policies, said Kristine Raper, a member of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, who was part of a panel of state policymakers.

California’s recent passage of SB 100, requiring the state to get all its energy from renewable and carbon-free sources by 2045, and the failure of AB 813, which would have begun the transition of CAISO into an RTO, received a large share of attention. (See California Gov. Signs Clean Energy Act Before Climate Summit.)

Here’s more of what we heard.

Policymakers Debate Regionalization

Energy leaders from Idaho, Utah and other Interior Western states said they’d only be interested in joining an RTO if it served their constituents’ best interests, especially with regard to costs, and if Californians didn’t control it.

“The governance is the piece that causes the most consternation,” Raper said.

AB 813 failed to make it out of the Senate Rules Committee in August, largely because California Democrats weren’t pleased with the idea of their state’s ISO being governed by outsiders from coal-burning states. The bill would have allowed CAISO’s governing body to include out-of-state members.

It was the third time in three years that a regionalization effort in California has failed to move forward. (See Western RTO Proponents Vow To Keep Trying.)

Several panelists at the summit said they didn’t see why it was necessary to have a single RTO in the West, while others were skeptical that any RTO was necessary.

“I don’t think it would be in my state’s best interests to jump two feet into a large-scale RTO,” said Cynthia Hall, vice chair of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission.

Hall said she’d like to first see the effects of expanding the Western Energy Imbalance Market, possibly to a day-ahead market, which is a more incremental step requiring less commitment on the part of member entities. Public Service Company of New Mexico, for example, applied to join the EIM last month. (See PNM Seeks to Join Energy Imbalance Market.)

California leaders and interest groups had expressed similar sentiments after AB 813 stalled in committee.

In a separate panel on regionalization, Laura Nelson, with the Utah governor’s office, said the pros and cons of a Western RTO have yet to be determined. Market efficiencies could be offset by problems with policy and governance, she said.

“We are concerned about what those costs and risks might be, and we don’t fully understand the benefits,” Nelson said.

DERs Will Prove More Challenging

The increasing role of DERs arose in several panel discussions.

“We see them moving forward aggressively,” said Neil Millar, CAISO executive director of infrastructure development.

The ISO predicts the generating capacity of residential solar panels and other behind-the-meter DERs will grow from about 8,000 MW today to 17,000 MW in the near future, Millar said. That will put a strain on systems that were meant to distribute energy from central power plants, not to gather it from rooftops.

“We have to look at a much broader range of assumptions, scenarios and operating conditions,” he said.

Patrick Damiano, the president and CEO of ColumbiaGrid, agreed.

“DERs are invariably coming to the system,” he said. Utilities will lose control of generation and information, while consumers will gain it, he said.

What’s needed for planning purposes is greater transparency of DER usage and a way to model the effects of so many scattered generation sites, Damiano said. The amount of data that needs to be collected is daunting, he said.

“In some ways that integrative-resources process has become more disintegrated,” he said. “It’s not a statement that it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just reality.”

Non-Wires Alternatives Gaining Ground

The rapid growth of DERs occupied much of the discussion on NWAs, which also include battery storage and other changes to the grid that don’t necessarily involve large-scale infrastructure projects, such as new transmission lines.

The inclusion of more NWAs is creating a challenging atmosphere for planners.

Louis Ting, director of planning and development for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the department is experimenting with numerous pilot projects to serve its 1.5 million customers in the 500 square miles of the city.

“On the non-wires alternatives, it’s been a very interesting journey to say the least,” Ting said. With little room to build new infrastructure, LADWP has been working to optimize its resources, including by leasing rooftops for solar power and talking with EV owners about drawing energy from the vehicles’ batteries, he said.

In the Pacific Northwest, Avista Utilities still mainly relies on traditional modes of generation such as natural gas, but the company is seeing increased interest from its customers in alternatives that allow them to produce their own power, Avista engineer Curtis Kirkeby told the summit audience.

“Our biggest customers are asking how they can play,” including by putting generating assets on their structures, he said. “We’re getting a lot of pressure to have alternatives for them.”

The utility has been working hard to figure how best to incorporate DERs and to become more proactive with planning, he said.

“Transmission planning has been done a certain way forever,” Kirkeby said. Now, he said, “it changes every single day.”

— Hudson Sangree