A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) recommends an expanded role for federal leadership in transmission planning.

Efforts to predict what the grid of the future will look like have a poor track record, according to a new report from NASEM. So rather than even try, the report on grid evolution takes a hard look at the current state of the U.S. energy transition and offers recommendations “to support whatever ways the power system evolves” so that it remains “simultaneously safe and secure, clean and sustainable, affordable and equitable, and reliable and resilient.”

Following the election of President Biden, the U.S. energy sector has been rife with reports and recommendations on how to accelerate the U.S. electric grid’s progress toward all those adjectives — including another study from NASEM released earlier in February. (See Report: ‘Social Contract’ Needed for Decarbonization’.)

What distinguishes the current report from the pack is its embrace of uncertainty and focus on the likely drivers of change, ranging from the development of grid-edge, distributed technologies, to impacts on jobs and social equity, to “shifts in the locus of electricity-relevant innovation” outside the U.S. The study was originally requested by Congress in 2018, and the committee of experts that wrote its more than 40 recommendations also included specific action items assigned to Congress and other federal and state agencies and policymakers.

Speaking during a Feb. 25 webinar to launch the report, committee member Karen Palmer, a researcher at Resources for the Future, said, “We have to recognize that which pathway we end up taking is going to depend on what customers want, what climate policies are adopted, what happens with economics, including market design, and also what happens with technology development.”

“The system is on the cusp of a fundamental transformation,” added Carnegie Mellon University professor Granger Morgan, who chaired the study committee. “Many of these transformations are not under industry control. How these transformations manifest will be different in different parts of the country. An environment that promotes technical, economic and regulatory innovation is essential.”

For example, referring to the recent power outages in Texas, Morgan pointed to a recommendation that the departments of Energy and Homeland Security “jointly establish … a visioning process [for] systematically imagining and assessing plausible large-area, long-duration grid outages.”

National Transmission Policy

Granger and other committee members kept the webinar focused on some of the report’s key recommendations, such as an expanded role for federal leadership in grid planning.

“First, we would encourage Congress to enact a national transmission policy that would rely on a high-voltage transmission system to support energy diversity, energy security and the nation’s equitable transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Susan Tierney, a senior consultant with the Analysis Group.

FERC should be authorized to direct transmission companies and operators to plan for a system that is not only efficient, reliable and resilient, but extends to areas of the country with high-quality renewable resources, Tierney said. The commission should also take over DOE’s role in designating new “national interest electric transmission corridors” and approving new lines in those corridors, she said.

Charting the US Innovation System

“It’s fashionable to say that we have the technologies now that we need” to decarbonize the grid, said David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. “That’s simply incorrect.”

Victor’s first recommendation is “to improve awareness and capacity; to take the pulse of how the U.S. innovation system actually works because there is such a big role for innovations coming from outside” both the electric power industry and the U.S. “Lots of different policy instruments have an impact.”

He also calls for tighter collaboration between DOE and DHS “around managing the tension between the benefits of globalization and natural security.” At the same time, NASEM echoes other recent reports in its call for an increase in funding for research and development in the face of a loss of U.S. leadership in innovation and global competition.

A broad range of government, industry and research stakeholders should work together to identify the “breakaway” technologies of the future and “develop and fund a research agenda that creates fast-moving programs that help to de-risk such solutions from technology, market and regulatory perspectives,” the report says.

The Need for Better Tools

Not knowing exactly how the grid will evolve “will require a major change in the way we approach the whole idea of tools,” Washington State University professor Anjan Bose said. “We are looking at a major change in the architecture happening to the grid, and not happening uniformly across the country. The only way we’ll be able handle all of this is if we do enough fundamental study of how these things all operate together.”

With the system changing rapidly, “it will be very important that the skill sets of our regulators are very high, that they have a lot of tools available to enable their modeling, simulation [and] analytics,” said Reiko Kerr, senior assistant general manager of power systems at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “The dynamic availability of information [is needed] to understand the decisions and be able to build in flexibility so that you can also course correct and not make decisions that would require years to unwind or fix.”

Terry Boston, former CEO of PJM, underlined the importance of advanced planning tools as more sectors of the U.S. economy are powered by electricity. “We’re talking about the electrification of fertilizer in the chemistry industry; we’re talking about the electrification of cement and even steel,” Boston said. “My greatest fear is we’re going to under-forecast the loads. How do we get to resource adequacy in a world where decarbonization means electrification of almost everything?”

Dartmouth College professor Elizabeth Wilson said that beyond better tools, a paradigm shift in how we think about energy will be needed. “This combination of critical infrastructure and fundamental changes to our system require that we engage in new ways,” Wilson said.

“What this report does really well is highlight the importance of energy for society, energy for vulnerable communities, and really mapping a path forward for how energy in the future needs to be integrated into our core societal decisions,” she said.