The future of the U.S. energy system is integrated, which had multiple meanings and raised complicated questions for a range of speakers at the United States Energy Association’s Advanced Energy Technology Forum on Thursday.

At Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the focus is on integrating thousands of megawatts of solar, offshore wind and energy storage onto the state’s electric system, said James Misewich, the lab’s associate director.

“What is the right energy storage technology? I don’t think lithium-ion is actually going to be that scalable solution we’re going to need,” Misewich said during an opening panel discussing the new technologies being developed at his and other national laboratories.

“We’re looking at other technologies — aqueous electrolyte storage capabilities, for example, that reduce fire hazards, and using more Earth-abundant materials, like zinc and manganese … There’s a nexus of energy storage challenges and grid challenges that need to be addressed together. We want to answer this question with modeling before we try to answer it on the real electric grid,” he said.

The half-day virtual forum provided a condensed, at-times provocative overview of the emerging technologies and policies that will be critical to rapid decarbonization of the U.S. grid, and the opportunities and challenges they pose for diverse stakeholders and regulators.

At FERC, Commissioner Allison Clements is looking at another critical nexus — in the Western states — on the need for integrated power systems that can “improve reliability, decrease cost for customers and ensure resilience in the face of disasters and extreme weather events.

“I’m spending a lot of time listening to people in the West, trying to understand what a more coordinated, more integrated market looks like for them,” Clements said during the forum’s second panel on infrastructure challenges at the federal and state level.

FERC has “a lot of expertise to bring to the table under the Federal Power Act,” she said. “We have concurrent jurisdiction with the states around a lot of these issues; so, things will not work in this rapidly changing environment if we’re not kind of walking together with the states on this path towards increased coordination.”

Unaffordable Resilience

Paul Kjellander, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), pointed to a new FERC joint task force on transmission that will provide federal and state regulators a forum to tackle cost and benefit allocation issues that can hamstring projects. NARUC recently nominated 10 state utility commissioners to the task force, which will have its first meeting at NARUC’s annual meeting in November, Kjellander said.

But he also echoed many in the power industry on the challenges of siting and approving transmission projects, and the problems for utilities when projects get stalled. The key differentiator between transmission projects that get built and those that don’t is whether they run through federal land subject to the intensive permitting process required under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), he said.

The NEPA process can take years, he said, and by the time such projects get sited, utilities may have to “find other options to serve the load. You can’t wait; you have to serve that load … and that makes that transmission line obsolete before you even break ground.”

Speaking on the challenges of system resiliency and hardening in the face of extreme weather events and wildfires, Kjellander said the pain point for utilities and regulators is often cost. Utilities could certainly build systems that could power up quickly after a storm, but the cost of such a system could make electricity unaffordable, he said. The unprecedented nature of recent storms and fires also makes adequate system hardening extremely difficult, he said.

With complex issues coming at regulators left and right, NARUC is now “laser-focused” on regulator education, Kjellander said.

“People aren’t aware of the harsh reality of being a regulator. The average tenure of a state commissioner is four years, and in many states, they don’t get elected because of everything they know about the utility sector, they get elected because they’re more popular than the person they ran against. … We’ve got to look at that — the need to educate regulators — to create the platform for them to get up to speed sooner, so they can be sharper and stronger in their role.”

Decarbonized, Distributed, Digitized

Mark Lauby, senior vice president and chief engineer at NERC, also spoke about the challenges to grid safety and reliability in the face of unprecedented extreme weather events that are widespread, of long duration and not going away.

“We need to understand what the implications are and plan, design and operationally plan what I’m going to be doing the season ahead to deliver the energy and such reliability services,” Lauby said. “And then also on a rolling, three-week basis, where am I going to get my energy from? These are the challenges being faced more and more.”

As the energy system becomes increasingly decarbonized, distributed and digitized, he said, current resource adequacy measures may already not be sufficient.

“We have multiple states where actually the worst time may not necessarily be on peak, but maybe when you are doing maintenance on units and you have a sudden cold spell, and now all of sudden, all your energy gets sopped up,” Lauby said. “What does that mean and how do we plan for that?”

Looking at the winter power outages in Texas, Lauby said, “This is the first time I’m aware, where load became a critical element to the reliable operation of our system. That is to say that we didn’t serve that load; that load then could not serve us. So that interdependency is something we have to start recognizing and modeling.

“One of the questions will be where are the balancing resources really coming from?” he said. Utilities and grid operators will have to manage “the uncertainty of various mixes that we have as we translate this policy and economic [realities] into a resource mix, which is perhaps more sensitive to weather and certainly has a built-in uncertainty to fuel,” he said.

Natural gas support will be needed until other technologies, like storage, hydrogen and small, modular nuclear reactors are available at commercial scale, he said. “Kind of like, in case of emergency, break this glass and move in.”

What Net Zero Means

For Marianne Walck, deputy lab director at the Idaho National Laboratory, an integrated system means developing applications for advanced, small and even transportable nuclear reactors to produce power and heat for industrial processes, clean hydrogen production and water desalinization. The lab is building its own microreactor — the Microreactor Applications Research Validation and EvaLuation (MARVEL) project — which Walck said could be online by 2023, with two microreactor test beds also being planned.

The goal for nuclear and low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture is to scale and bring down costs by expanding their uses beyond electricity production, said Jennifer Wilcox, the DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy and carbon management.

The department’s work on carbon capture has been mostly focused on coal, she said, but “we’re leveraging that expertise” to examine capturing natural gas in the power sector while also looking at industrial sectors as well, specifically cement and steel.

“When you look at coupling these kinds of industries to carbon capture and reliable storage, you can provide low-carbon supply chains to help others meet their emissions reductions in terms of net-zero goals,” Wilcox said.

Carbon capture goes to the heart of “what net zero means,” she said, referring to the “committed emissions” that are already in the atmosphere or will be as a result of ongoing fossil fuel use.

“For every carbon dioxide molecule we put into the atmosphere, we have to be able to pull it back out, and that’s net zero. That’s the simple math,” she said. “We have to deep-decarbonize in every sector and every chance we can … because if we don’t do it, and we let those emissions go into the atmosphere, we’re going have to pull them back out.”

But scaling carbon capture technologies — such as the Orca direct-air capture plant opened on Wednesday in Iceland — should not be seen as a license to continue “burning fossil fuels 24-7,” Wilcox said.

“Things like direct air capture should really be used very strategically in order to offset emissions that are hard to avoid, like the aviation sector as a whole and agriculture. One of the things we’re trying to do in our office also is decoupling carbon dioxide removal from fossil [fuels] so that they’re not conflated.”