Maine’s efforts to decarbonize are highlighting the role flexibility will play on the grid of the future.

“We need to start figuring out how to create demand flexibility today,” Ian Burnes, director of strategic initiatives at Efficiency Maine Trust, said Tuesday at E2Tech’s Planning the Grid of the Future webinar.

The call for flexibility seeks innovation beyond just demand-side management to accommodate and balance growing distributed generation and loads from electric vehicles and heat pumps. At Efficiency Maine, Burnes says, it will be necessary in the coming years to “demonstrate and put real numbers behind what full-scale demand flexibility is going to provide.”

To do that, he said, utilities must invest in transparent, real-time load data at the distribution level. From there, “we’re going to need the capability to take the data on what’s happening all the way down to the distribution level and model that [transmission and distribution] system to identify the load constraints and generate solutions,” he said.

A foundation of systems and policies that allows utility-level data to be shared with others will enable the private sector to develop “an ecosystem of devices that live on the system and provide benefits to ratepayers,” he added.

Real-time price signals at a granular level will likely become a part of a flexible grid solution for maximum integration of renewables and customer benefit, while reducing infrastructure investment.

“The hard part is to be able to say when we need [real-time pricing] and what we need to do to get there because that’s a long way off,” Burnes said. “We could have a great deal of customer benefit if we had even well-designed static pricing for a while.”

Efficiency Maine wants to move toward a flexible grid with its proposal for a demand management program that features a traditional demand response program and a load shifting initiative. The proposal is part of the trust’s Triennial Plan for 2023-2025, which is open for public comment through July 28.

The demand response program would compensate participants for reducing electricity usage when they are given a signal to do so. Under the load-shifting program, however, residential, low-income and commercial customer devices would offer programmable and potentially networked operations that respond to internal or remote signals.

During a previous pilot program, Efficiency Maine identified EV chargers and battery storage systems as having the highest potential for load shifting, while heat pumps were less viable because of their inherent high efficiency.

For EV smart chargers, the program will incentivize charging to take place during ISO-NE off-peak hours, according to the plan. And for energy storage measures, the program will require verification of connectivity, curtailment performance and algorithm effectiveness.

Transactive Energy

An upcoming microgrid pilot in Maine is set to demonstrate how the use of transactive energy principles can enable load flexibility.

The pilot, which Kay Aikin, founder and chief product officer at Dynamic Grid, says is set to begin this summer, will address aging electric system challenges on Isle au Haut in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. The community has turned to a microgrid option that includes solar, battery, heat pump and diesel technologies for its power.

Dynamic Grid’s technology will allow the heat pumps on the microgrid to transact with the system based on energy prices they receive. The heat pumps essentially look at a price signal and decide if it is cost-effective to run or defer to another generation resource.

The company is also leading another pilot on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine that it has submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Connected Communities funding opportunity for grid-interactive efficient building communities.

As proposed, the pilot would move the island toward “a networked group of microgrids, all driven by price, or dynamic pricing scheme, to coordinate the loads as well as the supply from storage and solar on the grid,” Aikin said.

The pilot will manage 2 MW of loads, which is about 10% of the peak loads on the system, as well as 3 MWh of energy storage, according to Aikin.

“This is an example of how we can make loads and distributed generation benefit and optimize for the greater grid,” she said. “Eventually, this is the direction where we will have to go.”

Maine Grid Policy

This year, the Maine legislature moved six bills related to grid modernization to Gov. Janet Mills for her signature.

Mills has signed three of the bills.

LD 1682 incorporates climate change into the Public Utility Commission’s powers and duties, Rob Wood, director of government relations and climate policy at The Nature Conservancy Maine, said during the webinar. The law also directs the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future to examine equity and environmental justice and how those concepts should be defined and incorporated into state agencies’ decision making, he said.

LD 1100 and LD 1053 are related to interconnection rulemaking and establishing a microgrid framework for the state, respectively.

The remaining bills are waiting for the governor’s signature.

LD 936 addresses net energy billing and would form a stakeholder group to make recommendations on a holistic long-term grid planning process, Wood said. LD 528 would implement recommendations from the state’s Energy Storage Commission and direct regulators to examine time-differentiated rates, he said. And LD 1710 would require the PUC to expedite transmission development in northern Maine to support renewables development.