AUBURNDALE, Mass. — If 50 years ago you prophesied that school buses would someday help a utility stabilize the grid, people might have suggested that you had been reading too much Tom Wolfe or drinking the electric Kool-Aid on the bus with Ken Kesey.
Same goes for heat pumps that use bitter cold air to heat New England homes.
Now — in 2020 — these phenomena are the stuff of real life in the energy industry, as 150 people heard Thursday at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association (NECA) Renewable Energy Conference.
Following is some of what we heard at the event.
Regional Outlook
New England needs to update the interconnection processes to reflect the value and unique nature of energy storage, said Jeremy McDiarmid, vice president for policy and government affairs at the Northeast Clean Energy Council.
“We need to figure out how the jurisdictional divide between distribution systems and transmission systems occurs in a way that allows these products to move forward, and perhaps most importantly, we need to figure out how to pay for it all,” McDiarmid said.
Siting is increasingly a challenge as communities are becoming increasingly wary of large solar developments, he said.
“Many of our states have seen the development of relatively robust solar industries over the past decade,” McDiarmid said. “Portfolio standards, net metering and a base of customers ready to adopt clean energy have driven a market that has brought jobs and a significant amount of clean energy to the region.”
The lines between transportation and electricity are getting more blurred every day, and that’s a good thing, he said.
“Nearly 40% of our emissions come from the transportation sector, and it has persistently been a very hard nut to crack,” McDiarmid said. “The Transportation Climate Initiative [TCI] offers the best hope for starting us down what’s going to be a very long path to capping transportation emissions and harnessing market forces to support the lowering of carbon emissions. This necessary transition can’t happen fast enough.”
Mobile Storage
The TCI is a regional collaboration of 12 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states and D.C. that seek to cut carbon emissions from the transportation sector. Participating states include Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.
The TCI concept is an emissions cap set by the participating jurisdictions, with a program projected to run from 2022 to 2032, explained Staci Rubin, senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation. Upstream fuel suppliers would be required to obtain an allowance equal to the amount of pollution that they generate, with the amount available declining over time.
“This would apply to on-road gasoline and diesel fuel, essentially covering 80% of the transportation sector emissions, on average, throughout the region from Maine to Virginia,” Rubin said.
Some of the proceeds from the sale of TCI emissions allowances would go to converting school buses from diesel to battery electric, or trolley electric where possible, she said. Boston’s mass transit operator, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, has only five electric buses out of more than 1,000 buses, and they are still in the pilot phase.
Rubin noted a Dominion Energy project in Virginia as “a great program to use electric school buses as active energy storage systems … a deep and large-scale deployment of these buses and situating them to ensure they can be dispatched to the grid and helping to better connect distributed generation.”
Will Lauwers, director of emerging technology at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), said that transportation and home heating offer nearly equal opportunities for cutting emissions.
“You’ll reduce your energy requirement by 75% just by going to an electric vehicle,” Lauwers said.
He recommended Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships-certified cold climate air-source heat pumps, saying, “You’re looking at reducing annual heating energy needs by at least 60% just by getting a heat pump designed for this climate.”
As to where the sectors converge, he cited a newly released DOER mobile storage study that shows “How mobile storage, in many cases electric vehicles … can benefit the commonwealth in emergency response conditions, and how EVs can operate as long-duration storage to increase reliance on renewables and reduce our peak demand,” Lauwers said.
The study shows that today’s storage capacity of EVs enables them to provide all the energy needs of a household for multiple days, even without efficiency upgrades to the building, he said.
Michael Hagerty, senior associate at The Brattle Group, presented excerpts from a study he co-authored last September on emissions reduction and said that it could be important to develop technologies for seasonal storage.
“Time-of-use rates also have been very effective at shaving peak loads for residential EV charging,” Hagerty said.
Look North
In Maine, the state legislature has seen a wave of “legislation promoting renewable energy and reforming the interconnection rules to facilitate the interconnection of distributed generation,” said Arielle Silver Karsh, senior regulatory counsel for Emera Maine.
The legislature established a commission to look into energy storage and brought in experts to provide information on how to incent storage, to ask whether utilities should be allowed to own it, and whether storage resources could be used for energy efficiency or to reduce the peak, she said.
“A lot of recommendations came out of that report, one of which is the commission recommended that the Public Utilities Commission open up a docket and settle the question of utility ownership,” Silver Karsh said.
“For Emera Maine, there would be hesitation to invest in energy storage without knowing is it possible to rate-base that asset,” she said. “Or how do we integrate that into our system and use it to defer transmission or distribution [upgrades]?”
Another important question is how does the state or the PUC incent energy storage, she said.
“Is it a question of combining energy storage with a renewable energy generating unit, or is it sufficient to just have storage alone?” Silver Karsh said.
Emera doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel, she said, so the company has reached out to National Grid and Eversource Energy to ask how they have worked on these various integration projects with developers, the states and other stakeholders.
The storage commission recommended setting a target of 100 MW by 2025, Silver Karsh said.
Electric load in Maine is “lumpy, with a fish farm popping up with 12 MW in an isolated place, so you need to react fairly quickly to that,” she said. “But Northern Maine is not directly electrically connected to ISO New England — but is connected to New Brunswick and indirectly to Hydro-Québec.”
Northern Maine has very low population density, which is great for wind farms, but if the generation exceeds the local load, “energy storage could be a great way to balance that out,” Silver Karsh said. “We’re still working with stakeholders to determine whether that energy could be exported to New Brunswick and Hydro-Québec.”
Up until the middle of 2019, there was approximately 3,000 MW of wind from Northern Maine in the interconnection queue at ISO-NE, said Abigail Krich, president of Boreas Renewables.
“We could still build that out, but we would need pretty significant transmission upgrades to the system,” Krich said. “Now I think there’s about 780 MW of wind left in the queue in that area because of those transmission constraints.”
To interconnect about 350 to 550 MW of generation in that area would require spending about $780 million, which would have to be paid by the interconnecting generators and result in an added energy cost of $23 to $36/MWh over a 20-year project span. That cost could be reduced if the capacity factor were increased by adding solar, for example, but it is “a large hurdle” to add to any new project, Krich said.
– Michael Kuser