BOSTON — New chief utility regulators from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine last week shared their visions of grid modernization and resource adequacy at Raab Associates’ 163rd New England Electricity Restructuring Roundtable.

The regulators were followed by a panel of all three offshore wind developers that bid into the latest solicitation out of Boston, who discussed the region’s huge baseline generation goals with an industry expert, an independent transmission developer and a state procurement official.

The following is some of what we heard during the morning.

Grid Modernization

Marissa Gillett, chair of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, said her agency expects to release a grid modernization order imminently, possibly within the next week, and that it is also busy exploring how to help roll out 5G in the telecoms sector and dealing with lost and unaccounted for gas in the natural gas sector.

“I am new to the culture in Connecticut, and what I mean by that is every state has their own setup about what they view as the role of the regulatory commission, versus what they view as the role of the energy office, versus the governor and the legislature,” Gillett said. She came to PURA five months ago from the Energy Storage Association, and previously worked as an adviser to the Maryland Public Service Commission.

“I’m looking forward to pushing the envelope [at PURA] and launching a grid modernization proceeding that will take probably upwards of two years to get through,” she said. “We’re looking to get new leads on a number of topics.”

Those topics include energy storage, electric vehicles, advanced metering infrastructure and innovative rate designs.

Her predecessor, Katie Dykes, currently commissioner of the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, “now has the authority to procure up to 98% of the resource needs in Connecticut,” Gillett said. “It has not all been utilized at this point, but she has that authority.”

The challenge is figuring out how all those procurements “piece together in the building blocks of, dare I say it, resource adequacy … and figuring out how that weaves its way into the grid modernization conversation,” she said.

Affordable, not Cheap

“When people hear ‘grid modernization,’ they think ‘cost,’ but energy affordability does not mean cheap electricity, it means affordable,” Gillett said.

“Folks look at electricity rates as being limited to the poles and wires, what it takes to deliver that commodity,” she said. “But since coming here, I’ve learned that certain states approach electricity and electrification of their economy as an economic development opportunity.”

Raab Associates’ Jonathan Raab, who conducted the roundtable, asked how residential rate design must evolve to achieve two things at once that may conflict with each other.

“One is to try and get EV charging off the peak when possible, and the other is not to scare away people using heat pumps, where the heating and air conditioning use is often more coincident with the peak,” Raab said. “How do we design a rate that can do both things, or do we have different time-of-use rates for either?”

“I have a couple of competing views about time-of-use rates,” Gillett said. “Rate design is going to be a critical component of the grid modernization process … so there are opportunities for innovative rate design that include TOU rates, even for the residential sector.”

The second half of the equation is asking whether TOU rates are the way to go, she said.

“One of the most obvious ways for Connecticut to decrease its electricity prices would be to increase its electricity sales,” Gillett said. “So if my primary goal is to electrify the economy, thereby increasing electricity sales, how does that pair with the concept of time-of-use rates. … If you’re going to shift the peak, then you have to shift the time-of-use rates … but there other ways to shift the peak.

“Figure out what the most pressing objective is and pair that to the long-term goal,” she said.

Maine Public Utilities Commission Chairman Phil Bartlett said it would be helpful “to imagine multiple styles of TOU rates. … If somebody is doing all new appliances, that’s one model; if they’re just getting an EV, that’s another. … There has to be some real nuance to the design.”

Bullish on EVs, Electrification

Matthew Nelson, chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, arrived at the last minute because he was overseeing the response to a major pre-dawn gas leak that caused the evacuation of 100 residents in Lawrence, one year after the city suffered catastrophic gas line explosions.

“The area is safe, but there’s lots of work left to do,” Nelson said.

Of distributed generation, Nelson said, “Massachusetts has one of the largest scales of [distributed generation] on the distribution system … and that is starting to tax the distribution system and starting to tax developers and slow down the process of getting people interconnected.”

The high-volume queues are an issue, he said: “How do we give clarity to developers?”

Beyond distributed generation, Nelson said he is “very bullish on electric vehicles … which are objectively better than gas cars: lower costs to maintain, lower fuels costs and gas stations are terrible … but is the system ready for fleet charging?”

“Electrification is the right policy, but I’m worried about implementation,” Nelson said. “How are we going to get away from oil and gas when they’re central to our peak load generation?”

Building Offshore Wind

Stephanie McClellan, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind (SIOW) at the University of Delaware, showed that states up and down the East Coast have approved or committed to procure more than 22 GW of offshore wind energy.

“Commitments and aspirations are one thing, but states actually acting swiftly and efficiently on those commitments is really where the rubber meets the road in this industry,” McClellan said. “The big takeaway from this is that half of that big pipeline of committed projects is already in process.”

While the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management expands analysis of cumulative environmental impacts of Vineyard Wind, McClellan said, “in these early days of establishing a supply chain, those areas, regions and developers who can solve the industry’s problems and move through this regulatory hiccup will benefit that region.”

“I do think this is going to shape up as a regional competition, and not a state competition,” McClellan said. “How are Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island going to compete in a regional way? Regional marketing is something that states can do together… but ultimately, offshore wind will succeed as a U.S. industry, not as a regional one.”

Massachusetts Undersecretary of Energy Patrick Woodcock said the fundamentals of offshore wind energy address “what I see as our biggest challenge as a region, of reliability and energy security in the winter. It is really at the point where I am most confident in the near term of justifying this for Massachusetts ratepayers.”

Regarding BOEM’s expanded analysis, Woodcock said, “I do want to highlight for this region not to look through this with a prism just for this project [Vineyard Wind] … but we should establish that permitting any project of this size is going to have environmental impacts.”

What Developers Say

Erich Stephens, chief development officer for Vineyard Wind, said his company is pursuing many projects but is on pause right now, with the 800-MW project close to completing state and local permits while BOEM expands the scope of analysis.

Stephens called for more land-based grid connection development, saying “the offshore part is relatively easy, constrained mostly by technical considerations, by how much power you can put down on a single cable. The hard part is where do you bring that cable.”

He showed four interconnection points in Massachusetts that “each can take 1,000 MW on a good day.”

“While we’re going to be able to get through these first rounds, we’re already at the point of needing to look at what are we going to do onshore to bring all this power off,” Stephens said. “The grid is indifferent to whether that interconnection is coming from an independent developer or from a generation developer, and the problem really is with the onshore part of it.

“I hate to say it, but it’s looking a lot like what is going on up in Maine … where you have a lot of generation trying to get into a pretty small area in the electric grid,” he said.

Ed Krapels, CEO of Anbaric, agreed in part, saying that up to 50 GW of new power sources “means you’re talking about a transmission system … and the big picture is what do you do to handle all that power?”

A well-planned ocean grid minimizes the need for onshore transmission upgrades, he explained.

“You need a plan, and it was in that spirit that … in New York and New England we filed a nonexclusive right-of-way application with BOEM, which got BOEM thinking about what the cumulative impacts of all these new transmission connections to shore would be,” Krapels said during a presentation.

Grid planning is critical to lowering the long-term costs of offshore wind, and a transmission company will perform a useful role if it tells policymakers what they need to know, Krapels said.

David Hang, president and head of development at Ørsted, said the company’s offshore wind development portfolio in the U.S. totals about 3 GW and that he’s most proud of the 130-MW South Fork project being built for the Long Island Power Authority.

“What I love about that project [is that] it was not a renewables solicitation; it was an all-source solicitation, and we beat storage, we beat peaker plants, and LIPA had a problem at a specific substation they needed a solution for, and offshore wind came and filled that void,” Hang said.

“We need to look at things on a long-term basis, not necessarily on a project-by-project view,” Hang said.

“As I’ve said before, how can we still screw this up?” he said, stressing the need for interactive stakeholder outreach and the importance of the first couple of projects delivering on the promises the developers have made to various partners and stakeholders. “There’s a lot of momentum here, but it’s still nascent; there are still only 30 MW that have ever been built [in the U.S.].”

John Hartnett, president of Mayflower Wind Energy, a joint venture between Shell and EDP Renewables, said, “The commercial business is going to drive the industry much more than the state solicitations.”

– Michael Kuser