By Robert Mullin

SEATTLE — The Western Electricity Coordinating Council should zero in on issues specific to the Western system when it sets its near-term priorities for 2021 and 2022, stakeholders told the regional entity at a Feb. 20 reliability workshop.

Utah Public Service Commissioner Jordan White, newly appointed chair of the Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Board (WIRAB), lauded NERC’s work last year in identifying the four broad “risk profiles” the Electric Reliability Organization must address in the near term.

They included the rapid transformation of the grid, threats from extreme natural events, security vulnerabilities and the interdependency of critical infrastructure across different sectors. Each category encompasses more specific challenges, such as those related to bulk system planning, resource adequacy, situational awareness and cyber threats. (See ‘Interdependencies’ Joins RISC’s List.)

“While WIRAB believes all of those risks are truly important and should be addressed in some fashion by the industry, ERO, governments [and] the public at large, WIRAB really took those risk profiles and used two simple criteria to prioritize those risks” for WECC’s purposes, Jordan said during the workshop.

The first criterion: “Does the risk have a uniquely Western view on it compared to other areas in the ERO?” Jordan said.

The second: What is WECC’s ability to make an impact, given its authority and expertise both internally and through its stakeholder committees?

Using those lenses, WIRAB compiled its own list of WECC priorities, which include focusing on resource adequacy and performance, the changing resource mix, the increasing complexity in control systems and extreme natural events.

On the resource adequacy issue, White pointed to recent Northwest Power Pool analysis that shows that the Northwest and Northern California could begin to experience shortages as early as this year and will face capacity deficits in the “thousands of megawatts” by the middle of the decade. A report by consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics last year warned that without new dispatchable resources, the broad region could see a capacity shortfall of about 8,000 MW by 2030. (See NW Price Spike a ‘Wake-up Call,’ ex-BPA Chief Says.)

“With recent announcements and current decommissionings in place for some of the baseload generation in the Desert Southwest, the resource adequacy issue will become more widespread across the interconnection as we go forward through this decade,” White said. “It’s for that reason [that] decision-makers [and] policymakers are really looking for a transparent, unbiased set of data projections as they go forward in making decisions” around resource planning.

WIRAB’s focus on the changing resource mix is driven by the increasing number of entities pursuing low-carbon or carbon-free goals. While Utah has a noncompulsory renewable portfolio standard, White said some communities in the state have adopted their own carbon-free goals for 2030, part of a pattern that’s taken hold across the West.

“It’s not just necessarily the states [adopting carbon policies]; it’s corporations; it’s renewable buyers; it’s municipalities,” he said.

“And with that change in resource mix … the challenges we’re facing now are increased variability [and] lower system inertia,” White said.

WIRAB’s concern over the increasing complexity in control systems stems from the growth of distributed energy resources.

“With the changing resource mix that I’ve discussed, the distribution system has become more dynamic. We’ve got new loads, resources … and more complex control systems. … As the line between transmission and distribution continually fuzzes, that is an increasingly important area to focus on,” White said.

White emphasized the importance of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ standard 1547-2018, which requires DERs be able to perform grid-support functions. It was recently endorsed by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. (See State Regulators Endorse IEEE DER Standard.)

Without appropriate settings for inverter-based DERs, WIRAB has determined that voltage disturbances in Southern California could propagate as far north as Oregon and Utah.

“We’re all connected together,” White said.

“With more inverter-based [resources] being added to the system every day, it is increasingly important to understand that interplay” between the distribution and bulk systems, he said.

WIRAB’s concern about extreme natural events is understandable given the series of devastating wildfires that have ravaged California in recent years, leading utilities there last year to increasingly rely on the unpopular policy of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS).

“Public safety power shutoffs are really one tool to reduce the risk of electrical equipment sparking [wildfires], but obviously these shutoffs pose hardships on customers,” White said.

To provide context around the sheer scale of disruption from PSPS, White noted that the Southwest blackout of 2011 affected about 2.7 million customers in Southern California and Arizona, with most seeing restoration within six hours.

“By stark comparison, in 2019, when the California [investor-owned utilities] conducted their shutoffs, that impacted roughly the same amount of customers; however, those customers were without power for an average of 2.1 days, and in some extreme cases, customers endured [shutoffs] for close to a week,” he said.

White added that nobody has studied the potential impact of PSPS on the rest of the West. “Obviously, [the IOUs’] customers are in California, but how might that eventually create a cascading event throughout the interconnection?” he asked.

Keeping the Lights on

WECC’s Member Advisory Committee also counseled the RE to keep a tight focus on issues particular to the West.

MAC Vice Chair Brenda Ambrosi, BC Hydro’s market policy and operations manager, laid out a set of “fun facts” about WECC, which covers 14 U.S. states, two Canadian provinces and the northern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

“Five of these states have the lowest temperatures [in the U.S.]; four states have the highest temperatures,” Ambrosi said. “Ten locations are the driest and sunniest. Six locations are the cloudiest. Five locations are the snowiest. The Western Interconnection has the most and least humid locations.

“What I’m trying to do is conjure up a picture in your mind of how unique and interesting the Western Electricity Coordinating Council region is, with respect to its topography, and how different it is from the rest of the ERO,” she said.

Acknowledging that the region must pay attention to universal industry issues such as cyber threats, Ambrosi advised WECC zoom in on the physical threats — from both weather and sabotage — to the “high-impact nodes” often located in remote, hard-to-reach areas.

“With all of these threats being out there and our uniqueness, the MAC thinks that we need to focus a little bit more on the physical threats, and we need to protect those extremely critical and valuable assets in our region,” she said.

Ambrosi said the California shutoffs are “a big impact and happening more and more.”

“We need to realize that these events are not only impacting the bulk electric system but the distribution system as well,” she said.

She said the MAC believes WECC “needs to work with regulators and policymakers to highlight the serious reliability repercussions [of PSPS] and try to find better solutions, rather than just turning off the lights.”

MAC Chair Russ Noble, reliability compliance manager with Cowlitz County Public Utility District in Washington, came at the interplay between the BES and the distribution system from a different angle — that of the growth of behind-the-meter solar.

“The interdependency between the BES and the distribution system is becoming more and more of a factor and is complicating the ability to keep the BES running smoothly,” Noble said. The MAC believes that regulators and policymakers have overlooked the importance of the distribution to BES reliability.

“We have standards for the BES, but we don’t have them for the distribution system, and we need to consider coordinating a reliability program” between the two systems, he said.

The MAC also asked WECC “to encourage regulators and policymakers to consider reliability impacts of resource retirements and stability challenges of inverter-based resources,” Noble said.

Head in a Bag

A “walk-around” exercise provided some flavor of the opinions of the workshop’s 80 in-person participants (20 more people dialed in). Attendees were encouraged to circulate throughout the conference room and read posters with descriptions of NERC-identified risks, then stand next to the posters containing the topics they felt WECC should prioritize.

A large group clustered around the “Resource Adequacy and Performance” poster. WECC’s Matt Elkins spoke on behalf of the group, saying participants expressed concerns about “everybody planning to go to the market at the same time. If that’s how they think they’re going to be resource-adequate, that could be a wrong assumption — if everyone’s trying to buy the same energy.”

But the biggest group by far gathered around the “Changing Resource Mix” poster. CAISO’s Sarah Garcia took to the microphone to explain this group’s thinking, saying, “We really think that this is the umbrella issue that affects or drives a lot of these others, or is driven by a lot of these others.”

Because the resource mix is changing more quickly than the industry ever anticipated — and in such high volume — “there are unintended consequences of what we put into place now because we just can’t foresee the future,” Garcia said.

She noted that a fellow group member had quipped that it’s “like we’re driving into the future with a bag over our head.”

Garcia took the joke further: “I think what’s really happening is that we’re driving into the future with a bag over our head, and our car has [an unpredictable] fuel source, and increasingly the car is going to be made of a thousand tiny drones with bags over their heads and unknown fuel sources.

“So, it’s pretty interesting.”