ISO-NE will revise the scope of its 2027 transmission needs assessments for Eastern Connecticut, Southwest Connecticut and New Hampshire after stakeholders raised questions about the study’s dispatch modeling, Director of Transmission Planning Brent Oberlin said Wednesday.

“It seems to be as you dial in more and more on the bus basis, the dispatches seem to be very severe in some of the cases,” Oberlin said.

During the September Planning Advisory Committee meeting, ISO-NE presented the assumptions and study methodology behind the 2027 Needs Assessment Scope of Work, a study produced biannually to provide insights into the system 10 years into the future. (See “2027 Needs Assessment Scope of Work,” ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee Briefs: Sept. 28, 2017.)

“If you look at the difference between the 90/10 cases and the 50/50 load level cases, you can see things becoming even more severe beyond what was anticipated using this new method, so we are going back and kind of hit the pause button for a second here trying to understand exactly what’s happening, what’s causing it,” Oberlin said. “We plan to come back to the November PAC to go into more detail on the issues that we’re seeing.”

Regional System Plan Tx Projects Update

Cost estimates have changed significantly for two transmission projects since the last Regional System Plan update in June 2017: the Connecticut River Valley project in Vermont (down $9.8 million) and the Maine Power Reliability Program project (up $7 million).

Fabio Dallorto, an ISO-NE transmission planning engineer, spoke about the projects and asset conditions during an update to the PAC.

The Vermont project (No. 1614) entails rebuilding a 115-kV line from Coolidge to Ascutney to resolve thermal overload. The decreased costs reflect competitive bids throughout the project and a reduction in the amount of contingency — from 50% to 10% — included in the estimates now that the projects are better defined, Dallorto said.

The RTO reported no new projects but said 16 upgrades on the project list have been placed in service since June, including four in the greater Boston area.

Western Mass. Structure Replacement

John Case of Eversource Energy reported that 19 of 263 structures on the 1231/1242 lines in western Massachusetts need to be replaced to maintain reliability. Some of the structures are more than 90 years old, and one crossing the Deerfield River lacks shield wire, which was inexplicably not replaced following a helicopter crash that damaged the wire several years ago.

The majority of structures on the circuits are double-circuit steel lattice towers. Replacing them reduces the potential for structural failures, Case said.

The project’s scope includes installation of 15 115-kV double-circuit and four single-circuit light-duty weathering steel structures to replace lattice towers.

Eversource estimated the project will cost $8.1 million.

Environmental Update Cites Uncertainty at Federal Level

Emphasizing the “uncertainty and the changes that are afoot at the federal policy level,” ISO-NE senior analyst Patricio Silva spent half an hour updating the PAC on all relevant environmental policy and regulatory matters affecting larger generation and linear transmission projects.

“We’re seeing significant changes with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation Recovery Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, [which] is actually having a dramatic impact in a variety of different regulatory forms,” Silva said during his presentation.

Silva pointed out that the Trump administration has advanced with its proposed withdrawal from EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which would affect carbon dioxide emissions from existing electric generating units. (See EPA to Announce Clean Power Plan Repeal.) The agency’s New Source Performance Standards for carbon emissions are also in limbo pending a review, and related litigation has been stayed. The agency’s pause, now reversed, in implementing new ozone standards also triggered litigation, he said.

“Lastly, more technical, but of particular interest to generators, there are changes afoot in the regulations under the Clean Air Act covering start-up, shutdown and malfunction events at generators,” Silva said. “That is a rule that’s under reconsideration and that’s also subject to litigation.”

Silva noted that his presentation only covered the Clean Air Act. “I hope you’re taking away from this that there’s a lot going on and we do not know what the outcome may be on some of these actions,” he said. “In fact, we do have in the oil and gas sector under the Clean Air Act an example of a misstep, where EPA paused and stopped to reconsider a rule only to have the litigation that was being used by the industry to stop the rule swept away.”

With the Trump administration rejecting EPA’s previous approach and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals essentially putting rules into effect mid-step, “there’s a risk of regulatory snap-back, where depending on where the EPA is procedurally with a reconsideration or a policy or implementation change, an affected industry sector may suddenly discover that they’re facing a fully implementable standard with a compliance deadline that has passed,” Silva said.

ISO-NE is closely watching upstream oil and gas policy because it could have a variety of implications under the Clean Air Act, especially for the operations of existing and new generators, he said.

— Michael Kuser