By Rory D. Sweeney

BALTIMORE — PJM’s Craig Glazer wrapped up last week’s Grid 20/20 conference by joking that the National Council of Teachers of English had tweeted an objection to the forum using “resilience” and “resiliency” interchangeably.

“They didn’t tell me what the right answer was,” he said, but that Dave Anders, who leads PJM’s stakeholder engagement process, promised a sector-weighted vote on which term stakeholders preferred.

The quip provided some insight into the challenges of addressing grid resilience. If getting the term right is hard, agreeing on a definition is harder. Harder still is determining what actions should be taken, who will take them and how all the disparate responsibilities and demands are integrated into an improved system.

Many of the gray areas and friction points were on display at the conference. Government representatives promised they could be trusted with sensitive corporate information while company representatives hesitated to offer too much. Gas-fired generators cited the importance of fuel security, while gas pipelines said generators have declined to sign the firm contracts that would guarantee fuel delivery. Everyone seemed to agree that more redundancy should be built into the system, but that it can’t be too complex or too costly.

“The fact is we’re not going to be able to be 100% secure, so we’re going to have to make choices,” said Stefanie Brand, director of New Jersey’s Division of the Rate Counsel. “I think those questions need to be answered at the beginning or else we’ll be throwing solutions at a problem that hasn’t been defined.”

Transparency

Several panelists representing government interests urged companies to share information and procedures to see if there are ways to help each other.

State governments “are all very eager to hear from the private sector in their various states about what they’re doing and how they can work together,” said Tim Blute, director of the National Governors Association’s Homeland Security & Public Safety Division.

Bill Lawrence, who runs NERC’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, assured attendees that his group maintains separation from the corporation’s compliance monitoring enforcement program to ensure that any information volunteered by companies “will not get them audited.”

“We’re trying to build that trust,” he said.

“At the end of the day, this is all going to come down to trust,” said Col. Victor Macias of the National Guard Bureau. He said the nation’s 3,300 National Guard facilities are prepared to help but need to know ahead of time what they’ll be expected to do.

Part of that may be led through the Department of Energy, which was given “far-reaching authority” through the 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act to issue emergency orders “to do whatever [the secretary of energy] thinks is necessary to restore the reliability of the bulk power system,” said Paul Stockton, managing director at consulting firm Sonecon and a former assistant secretary of defense.

“A cyberattack will attract much more direct U.S. government attention” than any prior blackout, he said.

The industry needs to help DOE figure out what those emergency orders should be “so they’re actually helpful to you in protecting and restoring grid reliability instead of being in the way or worse,” he said.

Companies expressed reservations that too much transparency can be a hindrance.

“Once you identify a cascading risk, how in an open stakeholder process do we get this risk mitigated without giving an adversary a blueprint of how to take down the network?” asked David Roop, director of electric transmission operations and reliability for Dominion Energy.

“There are so many things now that we’re at risk with that many of us don’t understand. It’s hard because too much transparency can create more vulnerability for us, more risk,” Southern Co. Vice President of Transmission Katherine Prewitt said. “I think we just have to talk about it and decide. We’re going to get it wrong sometimes, but we’re going to get it right sometimes too.”

“As far as anything that is public, we work very closely on what are the appropriate questions to ask, what we’re willing to put out publicly,” said Laura Ritter, lead security policy adviser for Exelon. “It’s not that utilities don’t want to share, but there is a limit at the point of you’re just giving information now to the adversary.”

Gas-Electric Coordination

With PJM’s generation fleet quickly transitioning to flexible, more responsive gas-fired units, fuel security has been a persistent issue. Gas is plentiful and relatively cheap, but it must be transported through pipelines that can’t always deliver enough fuel for generators when heating demand is high.

“When we’re in a heavy winter-weather event, and we have a lot of operational flow orders on the gas system, that’s a critical time. Should we be operating differently? Should we look at conservative operations in certain circumstances?” PJM CEO Andy Ott asked in his opening remarks.

“We need to look at … what happens when a compressor station goes out on a pipeline, what happens [when] a pipeline itself goes out, how quickly do we lose the fuel source, how quickly do we lose a generator from an operational perspective,” he said. “Do we look at operating reserves? Do we need to deploy spinning reserves differently to make up for those types of events?”

Richard Kruse, vice president of gas pipeline company Enbridge, said the issue is more basic than that.

“Currently, electricity to a significant degree is using capacity that is released from primary customers and, as such, until it’s scheduled, it’s interruptible,” he said, adding that generation units can account for up to a third of Enbridge’s pipeline capacity during nonpeak periods.

“What keeps me up at night is those days when it gets cold and our traditional firm customers are using their capacity as they’re entitled to and [generating units are] forced off. That can happen … from weather conditions very quickly,” he said. “In terms of giving PJM any assurance that tomorrow — before the [capacity-use] nominations come in — we can guarantee that this power generation will be able to run is beyond our knowledge base. It will depend on how that generator contracts. It will depend on where he’s sourcing his gas. And it will depend into how he fits into a queue that’s deemed very complicated.”

Fixing the issue “will require infrastructure, and that’s a big challenge,” he said, because the industry requires firm contracts to build new pipelines. He noted the difficulties his company faced in its efforts to build in New England.

“We have been unable to navigate the state policies about who can and who cannot contract for pipeline capacity,” he said. “If you have [firm] customers, we have proven with time you can navigate those waters. Without customers, you don’t get to first base.”

The inability to expand New England’s pipelines has left the region in a “precarious situation,” ISO-NE Director of Operations John Norden acknowledged.

“In the winter, it’s very difficult for generators to rely on gas that they don’t hold firm capacity rights to on the pipeline infrastructure, so New England is highly dependent upon liquified natural gas that comes from the Middle East — [which is] not exactly the best place to be relying upon for fuel supply — and from South America.”

Cost-Effective Construction

Transmission planners have long had to balance the desire to enhance reliability while limiting the impact of additional infrastructure on the public.

Utilities all have unique situations and demands to address, so “one of the things we got to make sure we don’t do is over-engineer our solutions,” Prewitt said. “If we over-engineer our solutions, we won’t get the result that we’re hoping that we’ll get in the end.”

Rob Manning with the Electric Power Research Institute touted the value of technology to solve problems.

“There are ways to increase our throughput. There are ways to reduce our footprint. There are options that we have for how we build and where we build and if we build that are technological solutions that we’ve got to explore,” he said.

Ott and Stockton called for “making critical facilities less critical” by building redundancies such as alternative transmission paths, but transmission representatives noted the tension that creates with the public.

“I don’t know that the general public always understands what it is that they’re getting” when a line is built in a new location, Prewitt said. “When we utilize a right of way that’s already there, we increase our risk. We have one circuit today, and we put two in tomorrow. A tornado comes through, and that creates a challenge.”

Ralph LaRossa, who heads Public Service Enterprise Group’s merchant generation arm, said the crews Public Service Electric and Gas sent to Florida to help with Hurricane Irma recovery have reported that concrete transmission poles were a “big winner.” He praised Florida Power & Light’s response but acknowledged “a lot of money was spent” because much of FPL’s transmission system is underground.

“How do you do that in a cost-effective manner and not burden the customer with all of that?” he asked.

Overlap Exists, but Implementation Key

Despite the concerns, most panelists acknowledged the value of the regional perspective provided by RTOs and ISOs.

“As we’ve been in PJM, it’s been very important to us because it’s given us more surety of supply in extreme events at a lower cost by being in a broader footprint,” Dominion’s Roop said. “As a vertically integrated utility that didn’t have to deal with it, you could just do your thing a whole lot easier, so [RTO membership] does have some constraints. But I think those constraints are minimal compared to the benefits you get out.”

LaRossa said the issue is knowing where to draw the line.

“There are some things that are naturally market-driven and there are other things that are naturally regulated. I think as we have matured as an industry, we’ve mixed that a little bit. And we just need to figure out where the right balance is for everybody,” he said.

“Although the methodology is different from organization to organization or government to private sector, I think there’s a lot more overlap in how we approach these things than there are differences. The hard part is trying to identify where those overlaps are and how they could be extrapolated and used on a wider scale,” said Jonathon Monken, PJM’s senior director of system resiliency and strategic coordination.