FERC and a group of regulators from 10 states began discussing gas-electric coordination at the first meeting of the new Federal-State Current Issues Collaborative on Nov. 12 on the sidelines of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Annual Meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

The new collaborative comes after a similar effort on transmission, which contributed to FERC Order 1920, FERC Chair Willie Phillips said at the meeting. Phillips said he was not tied to any outcome from the effort: It could lead to regulatory changes or suggestions for a legislative response.

“But I am wedded to one basic and, I think, irrefutable fact: In a nation that today is heavily invested in and dependent on natural gas as a dominant fuel in our electric supply portfolio, it is unacceptable for that fuel to not be available to meet our energy supply needs, especially during emergencies,” Phillips said.

While many disagree over the future of natural gas, the fact is that it is leading to reliability issues now and will into the foreseeable future, he added.

The issue has been kicked around for decades. (See RTOs Jointly Call for Improved Gas-electric Coordination and NAESB Forum Chairs Push for Gas Reliability Organization.)

“This forum or collaborative does not need to necessarily end with any specific action,” said North Carolina Utilities Commissioner Kimberly Duffley. “Rather, the purpose is truly discussing the current issues in a roundtable format so each of the NARUC regions and FERC can understand each other’s perspectives and positions and views, along with all of the regional differences.”

Winter storms in recent years have highlighted the risks around failing to improve coordination, which include huge costs as commodity prices spike and can lead to premature deaths when customers lose their heating at the height of winter, Duffley said.

While previous efforts have made some improvements around scheduling and opening up lines of communication between the two interdependent energy markets, they are largely siloed, said New Hampshire Public Utilities Commissioner Pradip Chattopadhyay. Ideally the end result of the task force will be to achieve “greater seamless interaction” between the two markets, he added.

One issue that has cropped up repeatedly is when cold snaps fall on long, holiday weekends, which can lead to significant issues because of the fewer opportunities to schedule delivery of fuel to generators, FERC Commissioner Judy Chang said. ISOs and RTOs increasingly factor risks on the natural gas side as they plan for and forecast reliability, she added.

While no silver bullet is going to solve the longstanding issues, Chang offered a few areas where things could improve, including information sharing and market signals to generators in restructured wholesale markets.

“The nomination process … could be better aligned between the electricity market and gas markets,” Chang said.

Many spoke about the need to expand pipeline capacity as the power sector uses more and more natural gas. But Maine Public Utilities Commission Chair Phil Bartlett said that New England has tried to do that, and it did not work out. The region’s politics also do not support major new pipelines.

“We are seriously constrained at our ability to bring in natural gas by pipeline, forcing us to rely significantly on LNG to try to get us through,” Bartlett said. “The system in New England was built largely to serve heating demand as well as to serve industrial loads. It was not designed to support gas generation, but gas generators have been able to successfully take advantage of excess capacity of the system, which exists for much of the year, most days, in order to power their operations.”

The issues come during winter cold snaps, when the pipelines are at full capacity and many of those generators cannot produce power. “If you have 10 to 14 days of really cold arctic temperatures, there’s a real concern that we’re not going to have access to the gas,” Bartlett said.

ISO-NE is working on capacity market changes that will aim to incorporate those gas constraints, which could lead to generators signing up for firmer gas supply, but Bartlett said success there was not guaranteed.

New England has been dealing with this for 20 years, as its position at the end of the pipelines and its cold winters made the issue obvious in the early days of its electric markets, ISO-NE CEO Gordon van Welie said at the Aurora Energy Transition Forum in New York in October. (See Future of Power Markets Discussed at Aurora Energy Conference.)

“I would have expected Winter Storms Uri and Elliott to have shifted the conversation. I’m shocked that it hasn’t,” van Welie said. “So, I’ve now resigned to ‘we need a 2003 blackout event’ before Congress will wake up and give somebody at the FERC, I think, responsibility for overseeing both of these networks.”

The 2003 blackout led to FERC and NERC’s reliability regime under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Uri was responsible for hundreds of premature deaths and huge costs in February 2021, but van Welie argued it was written off as something unique to Texas, and for change to happen nationally, some major disaster needs to hit the Eastern Interconnection to move the politics of gas-electric coordination to a place where the issues will be addressed.

“We’ve got all these frictions and resistances in the system, so it’s not going to happen until something really bad happens,” van Welie said.