By Rich Heidorn Jr.
WASHINGTON — A standing-room-only crowd got a glimpse of the grid of the future — and what’s keeping us from getting there — at last week’s Energy Bar Association Annual Meeting.
The session was titled “Tomorrow’s Grid is Here.” But in their description of the technical, regulatory and behavioral obstacles, some members of the panel seemed to want to add the word “almost.”
“Electricity is a public good. Yet the system we’ve got is going through a huge transformation and from my perspective there’s no one at the helm,” said Malcolm Woolf, former head of the Maryland Energy Administration who is now senior vice president with Advanced Energy Economy, a national business association.
“Utilities are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do based on historic incentives, but those may not be right for what we want today. The federal government is largely deferring to the states … and the states don’t really have the capacity to drive this. They don’t really know what they want.
“With the exception of a few states like New York and maybe California and Hawaii … I don’t think those conversations are going on.”
Not an Extension Cord
Woolf said policymakers need to stop thinking of the grid as “a long extension cord” with centralized generation and one-way power flow to a “market-maker network … where you’ve got a lot of distributed generation, a lot of centralized generation, all integrating to help our reliability and resiliency.”
Corporate America has moved more quickly than regulators, Woolf said. “Sixty percent of the Fortune 500 have renewable and climate goals, yet it’s only a handful that are going to be able to do deals because in most of the country it’s really hard to do deals. In North Carolina, the SolarCity — solar leasing — model is not legal. In Maine [and] still vertically integrated states, you can’t do offsite [power purchase agreements]. Talk to eBay who passed an offsite PPA bill three or four years ago in Utah and still hasn’t been able to get the project up and running.
The “MGM [Grand hotel and casino] in Vegas has just decided to go off grid and pay a massive $80 million penalty to NV Energy because they just want to self-generate,” he continued. “There’s a whole array of state barriers because no one thought that business wanted their own solution.”
Among the speakers was Deputy U.S. Assistant Energy Secretary Michael Pesin, who described the “three-legged stool” of research and development: technology, policy and markets. Rudolph G. Terry, director of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., gave a presentation on the conversion of the Philadelphia Navy Yard from a defense installation to an urban industrial campus with its own microgrid.
Providing the utility perspective was Robert Stewart, manager of smart grid and technology for Pepco Holdings Inc.
Pepco has 26,000 net metering customers (360 MW of solar capacity) and is receiving 1,000 applications a month. It can’t accept them in some rural areas of New Jersey served by 12-kV lines. “We have five feeders that were closed [to new solar],” he said, adding that technical fixes will allow at least some to reopen eventually.
Impact of Electric Vehicles
Stewart also talked about the potential impact of electric vehicles, and how to make them practical for low-income drivers who could benefit from their low maintenance and operating costs.
“The problem is most of these people live in multi-dwelling units. They can’t have their own charger. So rather than try and solve the issue with multi-dwelling units, if you gave them access to a charge someplace else — workplace charging through DC direct fast charge, [or] they stop and get a cup of coffee [and] top it off — it’s more like an appliance to them.”
Pepco faces another challenge in older, wealthier suburbs with high concentrations of EVs, such as Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Because EVs draw about half the power of a full home load, such areas are at risk of overloading their transformers, Stewart said.
Based on a pilot program, Pepco believes most EV drivers will plug in between 4 and 8 p.m., increasing the afternoon peak load.
The company hopes to spread the load through time-of-use rates, which Stewart said could save the owner of a Nissan Leaf $300 a year. But utilities have a hard time making their case, he said.
“Even though you sit there with the numbers and you try to prove to them all you have to do is not charge between noon and 8 p.m. and you get [savings], the customer still is not with you,” he said. “They think there’s something behind the scenes. It’s too good to be true and the utility is really just trying to rip them off.”
