By Michael Brooks

WASHINGTON — The International Summit on the Electric Transmission Grid was billed by trade group WIRES as an opportunity “to discuss and support the robust interregional and cross-border grid of the future.”

But though it was hosted at the Canadian Embassy and featured several Canadian speakers, the discussion mostly centered on the first part: interregional transmission lines — and, more specifically, those that cross state borders rather than international ones.

After all, as more than a few speakers noted, building interstate transmission lines in the U.S. is hard enough without the additional burden of getting a presidential permit to cross national boundaries.

The drive to build both interstate and international long-distance, high-voltage transmission is the same: moving vast amounts of renewable resources to serve growing state demand, itself driven by state and company emissions goals.

In the U.S., California and the Desert Southwest have abundant solar, and the Midwest and Texas are replete with wind, while Canada has more hydropower than it needs to serve its load, located mostly along the U.S. border.

It’s so abundant that the word “hydro” is often used as shorthand for “electricity,” even if it’s “not necessarily generated by hydro assets,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin, now a partner with Dentons. “In Ontario, there’s probably 50% nuclear power generation, and it’s all called ‘hydro.’”

But Canada does not face all the same challenges as the U.S. when it comes to building long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines.

One reason comes down to simple geography. Canadian provinces are much larger than America’s states: Though the two countries are about the same size, Canada only has 13 provinces. Lines need to run vast distances from the water in the north to the load centers in the south, but most of the northern land is “open and expansive and owned by the Crown,” said Mike Martelli, president of renewable generation for Ontario Power Generation (OPG), referring to the government.

There’s also no federal entity similar to the Department of Energy or FERC that oversees interprovincial transmission. Provinces need only work with each other to site lines, and many provinces own their own utilities, “Crown corporations” such as OPG, BC Hydro, SaskPower, Manitoba Hydro and Hydro-Québec.

“All the provinces have 100% jurisdiction … so it’s a much easier discussion, and it’s a discussion where we can talk more about … the economic benefits, the jobs, the benefits to First Nations and our communities, and all that information is used in making that informed decision at a provincial level,” Martelli said.

Still, interprovincial transmission is uncommon, Martelli said. “All the provinces put up barriers. They like to develop a homegrown solution. And that’s where I think we have to change our thinking, and the true solution is going to be a more integrated approach.”

The final major difference between the U.S. and Canada: politics.

The summit was held Oct. 24, just a few days after Canada’s federal elections. “When the people were interviewed on the street about what’s their No. 1 issue, it’s climate change,” Martelli said. “It wasn’t their taxes. We’re tremendously taxed. … We have high, very high taxes. It wasn’t taxes; it wasn’t health care; it was climate change.”

In May 2009, Ontario passed the Green Energy Act, which created feed-in tariffs for renewable resources. As a result, Martelli said, the province retired all 7 GW of its coal plants and now has 6 GW of wind and 3 GW of solar. “Prices went up about 40%, and people were terribly upset,” he said. “But Ontarians seem to be warming up to the idea” because of their prioritization of emission reductions.

Canada’s generation is “just over 80% emissions-free, and we’re working to make it even cleaner by phasing out coal-fired generation across the country by 2030 and developing small-modular nuclear reactors to transition remote and northern communities off diesel,” Martin Loken, minister of political affairs at the embassy, said in opening the conference.

South of the Border

“For the United States, the integration with Canada, and the opportunities for getting additional carbon-free electricity is absolutely essential” to reaching the targets under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, said Ernest Moniz, former secretary of energy under President Barack Obama. “We have to get the infrastructure to support it.”

He talked about “an absolutely beautiful case” under Section 1222 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Clean Line Energy Partners’ Plains & Eastern Clean Line. “It was a beautiful example to implement, and the only problem was called ‘Arkansas.’”

Michael Skelly, co-founder and former president of Clean Line, was there to talk about the lessons learned of his company’s failure. Some of them he only learned “after reading the book” on the subject, he said, referring to The Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Gold’s “Superpower.” (See Book on Tx Developer Transmits Climate Hope.)

One lesson he focused on was the mistake of putting transmission before generation. “We may have been too early. If you look at how transmission is built around the world, [people] often enough build the generation first,” said Skelly, now a senior adviser with Lazard. “The good news in the United States is we’re doing exactly that. … We have a huge renewable expansion taking place, particularly in the center of the country. …

“We sort of thought that would happen” when Clean Line was proposing its projects, “but sometimes people need to see it actually happening before they realize, ‘Wow we have to do something about this problem,’ as opposed to a projected problem.”

Skelly clarified that he was not saying this “bass-ackwards” way of designing the grid was good. “It’s only a good thing to the extent that we go, ‘Oh wow, we have to go build this transmission because we just spent all this money on generation.’”

Discussion on Skelly’s panel — which included Martelli, the American Wind Energy Association’s Amy Farrell and the Solar Energy Industries Association’s Katherine Gensler — turned to criticism of RTOs and their transmission planning processes. Farrell and Gensler agreed that the RTOs underestimate the amount of renewables expected to come online when they plan their grids.

“Planning transmission to meet policy goals; planning for interregional transmission: These are the right goals, and nobody has cracked that nut yet on how to do it,” said Gensler, SEIA’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “Outside of California, no future scenario, not a single one, has 20% solar in it. Some of them don’t even have 20% renewables in them. … We have to plan for a rapidly decarbonizing future, and that is hard for people.

“A lot of the planners want to be very conservative,” Gensler continued. She pointed to wind consistently outperforming what RTOs expected within their 10-year scenarios.

Farrell, AWEA’s senior vice president for government and public affairs, noted that FERC is reviewing its transmission incentives policy, but “there hasn’t been a desire to really [review] Order 1000,” the goal of which was partly to encourage transmission planning between RTOs. “You have to look beyond just incentives and existing transmission improvements, and start looking toward fixing this planning process, because … it’s not about enabling renewable deployment as it is … leaving money on the table. Part of FERC’s mandate is to help drive toward a lowest-cost solution, and we don’t have a process for that right now.”

“The turf wars and feuds between RTOs are legendary; MISO and SPP, these people, for reasons that are often lost to the mists of time, they don’t really like each other that much, and they don’t work well together,” Skelly said. “So the notion that FERC’s going to pass something that says, ‘Hey, you guys, coordinate and work together’ … come on. It has not happened, and it’s not going to happen.”

In a later panel, MISO President and COO Clair Moeller disputed that, saying, “I’d submit we don’t actually have a planning problem. We have an objective problem. The reason we don’t get the answers that everybody agrees with is that people’s objectives are different.

“Lanny and I had a fistfight in the bathroom because RTOs don’t get along well,” he joked, referring to Lanny Nickell, SPP senior vice president of engineering, who was in the audience. “Well, that’s simply not true. The simple fact is the objectives are different. … Until we can get the objectives so they line up [around a policy consensus], the planners are going to be frustrated because we can’t tell them what we like.” He noted that the last of MISO’s multi-value projects, approved by the RTO in 2011, “won’t go into service until probably 2022. That’s not a planners’ problem. That’s a regulatory problem.”

Skelly also described the confusion that state regulators have to endure when being pitched multiple interstate lines. “We need policy mechanisms so that the RTO shows up and FERC shows up. Somebody needs to show up from some sanctioned body to say, ‘Yes, this makes sense.’”

But FERC commissioners “hate telling state regulators what to do,” Gensler said. “That is a fate worse than death for most FERC commissioners.”

As a potential solution, Skelly pointed to Sen. Martin Heinrich’s (D-N.M.) announcement that he would introduce bills to create an investment tax credit for “regionally significant” transmission projects and to direct FERC “to improve its interregional transmission planning process.” Heinrich, however, has been introducing similar legislation since 2015 to no success.

“I thought, up until a few minutes ago, that our process was very political,” Martelli said. “But listening to this, I’ll take our process any day.”

“You guys were smart enough to organize your provinces in a north-south fashion,” Skelly quipped.