BOSTON — More than 150 people turned out for a public forum Thursday to discuss ISO-NE’s draft 2019 Regional System Plan (RSP), which uses a 10-year planning horizon to estimate the need for energy resources.
Anne George, vice president for external affairs and corporate communications at ISO-NE, welcomed the participants, including several members of the RTO’s Board of Directors, as well as state officials.
Among those in attendance: New Hampshire Public Utilities Commissioners Kathryn Bailey and Michael Giaimo; Jared Chicoine, director of the New Hampshire Office of Strategic Initiatives; New Hampshire Rep. Kat McGhee; Andrew Landry, Maine deputy public advocate; and Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities Commissioner Matt Nelson.
“We’re pleased to have with us experts on not only what’s happening in the energy space in New England, but what’s happening in other regions and other industries as well,” ISO-NE Director Vickie VanZandt said. “The energy industry is changing, and there are many questions that we’re all asking. How will residences and businesses be using electricity 10 years from now? What resources will be supplying that energy?”
VanZandt on Friday was re-elected to her third consecutive three-year term, as was fellow Director Barney Rush. They shared the slate with former FERC Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, who was elected to her first term. (See related story, LaFleur Elected to ISO-NE Board.)
The following is some of what we heard at the forum.
Green and Lean
Young people that want to make a difference in the world should get into the area of electrical energy, said Damir Novosel, president and founder of Quanta Technology, as he delivered a keynote presentation on resilient and affordable energy.
“Sometimes we are not communicating this to the young generation,” Novosel said.
He had additional advice for the grown-ups in the room.
“Another point is that as you make regulatory and business decisions, it’s so important to look at the technical facts,” he said. “Objective technical facts or issues are very often distorted for the sake of some business or political aspects. … I want to make sure here that society looks at a technical fact as the key to be able to make some of the decisions going forward.”
Today’s decisions will affect the future grid, “so it’s important we get our grid modernization priorities right,” Novosel said.
Michael Henderson, ISO-NE’s director of regional planning and coordination, summarized the draft RSP with the key messages of energy security, grid transformation and interregional planning. (See ‘Grid Transformation Day’ Highlights ISO-NE Challenges.)
“What we’re finding is that retirement is a key driver for new resources … and near load is the best place to develop new resources, particularly [in] southern New England,” Henderson said. “I do ask developers to exercise caution, because resources must be situated where they work best on the system electrically.”
The interconnection queue determines reliable points of interconnection, he said. As of April 1, there were more than 19,000 MW of resources in the queue, including more than 11,300 MW of wind (9,000 MW of which is offshore), almost 3,100 MW of large-scale solar and about 1,400 MW of battery storage.
“ISO-NE now uses cluster studies that can account for allocating transmission interconnection costs among developers seeking to interconnect to the system. The first such study was completed for northern and western Maine, and the second one, essentially in the same area, is planned for completion by the end of this year,” Henderson said.
As he had at the previous week’s Consumer Liaison Group meeting in Portland, Maine, Michael Macrae, energy analytics manager at Harvard University, asked how the RTO plans to improve its emissions reporting, particularly on locational marginal emissions. (See “Emissions Reporting,” Overheard at ISO-NE Consumer Liaison Group: Sept. 5, 2019.)
“There’s always a lag in these reports,” Henderson said. “The 2018 report won’t come out until late this year, and that does account for the units that are locational and marginal units on our system. In terms of real-time data, I do know that it’s something we’ve been thinking about, not so much real-time, but perhaps after the fact, maybe a week later.”
Henderson emphasized that the RTO might “be looking at posting something a week or so afterward, as doing so in real time could cause any number of issues, ranging from data to releasing market intelligence that we shouldn’t in real time.”
Disruptive Technologies
ISO-NE Director Brook Colangelo moderated a panel on disruptive technologies.
Marshall Van Alstyne, professor of information systems at Boston University, discussed how new technologies are disrupting other industries and how the new phenomenon of “network economics” or “platforms” affects the energy industry.
“We are going through a fundamental shift in the nature of how work is done,” Van Alstyne said.
For evidence, he compared the market capitalizations and number of employees for century-old industrial giants like BMW and General Electric with the new titans such as Apple and Facebook, which can have three to five times the market capitalization on a mere 20% of the workforce.
“I can promise you the engineering’s always going to be the same; physics don’t change,” said
Katherine Prewitt, president of transmission for Eversource Energy, answering Colangelo’s question about her “favorite” disruptive technology. “The engineering, as complicated as it is, is the easiest part.”
Mark O’Malley, chief scientist for energy systems integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said, “Your change here is irrelevant. If you think you’ve got issues now, wait and see what’s about to come. New England is actually a fairly lackluster place when it comes to change. You’ve virtually no renewables on your system.
“All you have to do is be nice to the Canadians, be nice to Hydro-Québec,” O’Malley said. “They have supply equivalent to 2 billion Tesla cars.”
O’Malley said the 2019 RSP’s approximately $1.3 billion in transmission spending is a drop in the bucket compared with expenditures in other parts of the world: “The Chinese are building multiple transmission projects thousands of miles long.”
As for a five-year planning horizon, O’Malley said that in 2005 planners were looking at 2 GW of wind penetration in Ireland in a couple decades, which looked like “an extraordinarily high number, way out there, but now it’s 2020 and [Ireland has] 5 GW. … My point is that if you’re thinking large, in a few years it will look small.
“I think people will change, how we think [about technology] will change, so it’s a social change rather than technological,” O’Malley said.
“People have been moving in the absence of the grid operator, and in the absence of the utilities for years,” said David Ismay of the Conservation Law Foundation. “I like what I’m starting to hear, but again, you’re 10 or 15 years back.”
Rep. McGhee, who sits on the state House Science, Technology and Energy Committee, said, “It’s been interesting to see the ISO is dedicated to reliability, and the generators’ organization is working on rates, and the overall sense of urgency with the public that something needs to be done, and it needs to be done soon.
“The goals are also not really as aligned as they should be because bending the carbon curve is the thing we should all be in service of,” McGhee said. “Where does that fit into the paradigm of the regional plan?”
— Michael Kuser