WASHINGTON — The transition to a more distributed power system is well underway, but system operators need better visibility into that shift, experts told GridWise Alliance’s gridCONNEXT 2022 on Tuesday.

“I’ve got 5,800 EVs and plug-in hybrids on my system, and I control 21,” said Mark Gabriel, CEO of Denver area cooperative United Power. “This number is going up between 100 and 200 a month. It is ramping like crazy, and we have no ability to control it.”

United Power has seen 9,400 of the 107,000 meters it serves adopt distributed solar, but it has control over none of those, he added.

The old days of vertically integrated utilities featured power systems that were much easier to run, and all of the risk was at the utility. But now the assumption of risk is moving toward the customer — or member in the co-op’s case, Gabriel said.

In response to the changes, United Power is shifting from its role as a generation and transmission cooperative to become a distribution system operator that will need to be linked up to a wholesale market, Gabriel said. Colorado law (SB 72) requires the state’s utilities to enter an RTO by 2030, but Gabriel said that shift should happen at least five years earlier.

Portland General Electric, which is facing many of the same issues, will get one-quarter of its supply from the distribution system by 2030, said Vice President of System Operations Larry Bekkedahl. The Oregon utility is also adding 3,000 MW of renewables and 1,000 MW of storage over the next decade to a system with peak demand of 4,400 MW.

“If anybody thinks they’re bored in our industry right now, come see me,” Bekkedahl said.

Those changes to supply are coming on top of climate-driven demand shifts. PGE saw its all-time peak in June 2021, when temperatures hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland. PGE’s demand was 10% higher than it ever had been.

“Our previous peak was 4,100 MW,” Bekkedahl said. This summer’s high was 97 F, with a peak load of 4,250 MW. “So everyone that didn’t have air conditioning the year before now has air conditioning in their house.”

Such rapid demand growth makes the historic utility practice of using the previous 15 years as a guide questionable, he added.

CAISO recently broke a 15-year-old demand record as high temperatures led to consumers using 52,061 MW on Sept. 6, said Hani Alarian, the ISO’s executive director of power systems, technology and operations. CAISO avoided rolling blackouts with a text message from the governor’s office urging Californians to conserve.

CAISO, which has seen solar grow to more than 14,000 MW, also has 12,000 MW of rooftop solar, which is only seen by the grid operator when it impacts demand. The ISO also has seen more than 3,000 MW of battery storage added in recent years, which will continue growing, Alarian said.

All that solar has made the hours of 4 to 9 p.m. during high demand days the most difficult to manage, as solar production falls off while demand remains high.

“In three hours we [ramped] almost 18,000 MW; that’s a sustained 100-MW ramp rate [per] minute for three hours,” Alarian said. “That’s a lot of ramp.”

While the demand side is changing because of climate change, distributed generation and electrification, advanced metering technology is keeping pace and is now much more functional than the first round of the technology, which only eliminated meter reading jobs and helped utilities with operations, said Jonathan Staab, manager of product development at Landis+Gyr. The second wave of advanced meters allowed for more engagement with consumers by enabling dynamic pricing and increasing customer visibility into their power usage patterns.

“The third wave in this evolution happens to be the wave that we’re in right now,” Staab said. “This wave, I would argue, is probably the largest technological advancement, and it involves direct and often real-time engagement with consumers.”

While Landis+Gyr provides the meters for that engagement, the firm Sense offers software that can show customers exactly which of their appliances are using power — and even whether something is wrong with one of them, said its vice president of energy services, Colin Gibbs.

Gibbs demonstrated how his company’s app showed his home’s energy uses as his wife, who was across the country, turned on appliances such as the coffee kettle and their clothes washer. The appliances immediately showed up on his app with their total power use. “It’s important to note that this is not a smart coffee kettle; this is not an IOT [internet of things] device; this is just some regular, old electric resistance coffee kettle that we use in the morning,” Gibbs said.

Sense currently has to add a small submeter to customers’ utility meter that costs about $300 and another $150 for an electrician to install it, but eventually that will go away as more utilities roll out advanced smart meters. Sense will offer apps for new smart meters, Gibbs said.