By Rich Heidorn Jr.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Even before its release last month, the Department of Energy’s grid study generated dozens of headlines because of expectations that its focus on “resilience” might provide a policy foundation for subsidizing financially struggling coal and nuclear generators.

But a month earlier, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s DOE-funded report, “Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation’s Electricity System,” went virtually unnoticed. Last week, one of the leaders of the study briefed the department’s newly reconstituted Electricity Advisory Committee (EAC) on the report, which recommended ways to prepare for “large-area, long-duration” outages.

“A lot of folks have as a primary responsibility worrying about reliability. Almost nobody really has primary responsibility for resilience,” Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Granger Morgan, chair of the committee that prepared the report, told the EAC on the first day of a two-day meeting at the headquarters of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).

The study says resilience is broader than reliability. “Resilience is not just about lessening the likelihood that these outages will occur,” it said. “It is also about limiting the scope and impact of outages when they do occur, restoring power rapidly afterwards, and learning from these experiences to better deal with events in the future.”

The DOE grid study, ordered by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, also made the distinction, saying that while “markets recognize and compensate reliability … more work is needed to address resilience.” (See Perry Grid Study Seeks to Aid Coal, Nuclear Generation.)

Interest groups supporting coal and nuclear energy have attempted to monetize the concept of “resilience,” which they say is impossible without their “baseload” generation. Groups supporting renewables and natural gas also have issued studies and policy briefs making the case for their generation sources. (See NG Lobby Goes on Offensive vs Coal, Nukes, Echoing DOE Report, Industry Study Touts Coal ‘Resiliency’ and Nuclear Industry Seeks PPAs, FERC, RTO Action After Grid Study.)

Morgan said one of the findings of the Academies’ report was that large-scale outages, such as those resulting from this summer’s Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, are more common than widely believed. Yet winning support for spending on resilience is hampered because some of the worst events imagined “haven’t happened yet,” Morgan said.

Valuing Resilience

“The loss of load probability is not equal to a willingness to pay” for resilience, commented consultant Clark Gellings, an EAC member who served on the New York Governor’s Infrastructure Commission following Superstorm Sandy.

“The willingness to pay changes dramatically once they’ve experienced something like Sandy … or the events that have happened in the U.S. in the last week or two,” he said. “The enthusiasm in the Northeast for [the integration] of central and distributed resources is much different than it is in other parts of the country right now.”

The report noted that while there have been studies of the value of electric power during outages of a day or less, “we know very little about what society is willing to pay [for] full or partial back-up service during large outages of long duration.” It called for studies assessing the value to customers of providing partial service through reduced amperage or rotating service during long-duration blackouts.

Visioning

The study encourages planners to conduct “visioning” exercises to imagine the challenges of a prolonged outage, such as what could occur following earthquakes on the West Coast or mass solar ejections in the Northeast. In Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon is located, the exercise produced the realization that the city needs electricity to pump sewage over its hilly terrain, Morgan said.

“We’re not naïve. We don’t expect this will result in a sudden transformation of how we think about these issues,” he told the EAC. “But if we can’t raise the visibility of the level of vulnerability our society faces to large-scale, long-duration blackouts, then because there doesn’t seem to be anybody in charge worrying about resiliency, I think progress will be much slower,” Morgan said.

Training

The report said operators of the electric system should conduct more regional emergency preparedness exercises simulating large-scale outages.

It acknowledged that more than 100 organizations participated in NERC’s November 2015 GridEx III, the latest of its biennial “distributed-play” exercises simulating cyber and physical attacks. But it also suggested current disaster drills are insufficient, saying “the level of sophistication of attacks may continue to grow along with the number of vulnerable cyber and physical targets.” (See GridEx III Shows Vulnerability of Power Grid to Cyberattack.)

Physical Assets

Researchers called for more investment in the physical components needed to recover from a large-scale blackout. “For example, DOE, [the Department of Homeland Security] and other agencies should oversee the development of more reliable inventories of backup power needs and capabilities, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mobile generator fleet. Investments should also go toward expanding efforts to improve the ability to maintain and restore critical services like power for hospitals, first responders, water supplies and communications systems.”

It also recommended using non-traditional sources, such as locomotive engines and hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles, for backup power and universal credentialing of repair crews loaned to storm areas by other utilities.

Smart Grid

Morgan said that the promise of a self-healing “smart grid” is far from reality because many utilities are unable to island sections of their transmission networks. Researchers also noted that despite increasing deployment of distributed generation and microgrids, “most U.S. customers will continue to depend on obtaining their power from the large-scale, interconnected electrical grid at least for the next two decades.”

Cyber Resilience

The report refers not to cyber “security” but to cyber “resilience.”

“Cybersecurity implies trying to keep the bad guys out,” Morgan explained. “But the evidence is increasingly compelling that the bad guys, in many cases, are already in and are just sitting there waiting to turn something on.” Cyber resilience focuses on responding quickly to mitigate damage and return to normal operations.

Research and Development

The study also called for more rapid implementation of resilience-enhancing technologies and operational strategies and the expansion of DOE’s research and development efforts on grid modernization, systems integration and cyber monitoring and controls, a topic that also came up at a Congressional hearing on Thursday. (See related story, Hurricanes Steal ‘Baseload’ Thunder at Grid Resilience Hearing.)

Who Should be in Charge?

EAC member and Great Plains Institute CEO Rolf Nordstrom asked Morgan whether the Department of Homeland Security or DOE should be responsible for resilience. Morgan acknowledged the report did not make a recommendation on that issue, calling only for the two agencies to “work closely” with utility operators and others. It also recommended a joint program by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the National Association of State Energy Officials to provide state regulators guidance on how to respond to identified vulnerabilities.

Role of EAC

It is unclear how the study, and the Electricity Advisory Committee’s (EAC’s) review of it, will inform federal policy. The committee’s mission is advising DOE on “modernizing the nation’s electricity delivery infrastructure” and implementing the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

EAC’s 24 members, who meet three times per year, are drawn from academia (Washington State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas A&M and Ohio State), utilities (Southern Company, American Electric Power and Florida Power & Light), state and local government (Washington House of Representatives, California Public Utilities Commission and Electric Power Board of Chattanooga) and other stakeholders (ERCOT, SPP, NERC and NRECA).

It has issued more than three dozen reports since 2008, including three in 2017. DOE issues a memo each year detailing its responses to the committee’s recommendations. DOE’s six-page February 2017 memo provided responses to eight recommendations from 2016.

PMUs Proving Their Value

Wednesday’s EAC meeting also featured a presentation on the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative by project manager Alison Silverstein, a former FERC official who was also one of the authors of DOE’s grid study.

Silverstein said phasor management units (PMUs) — which provide 30 to 120 samples per second, 100 times faster than supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems — are providing real-time situational awareness and early warning of grid disturbances and failing equipment.

In addition to saving money, identifying problems before equipment fails can protect utility workers, Silverstein said. A capacitor voltage transformer can explode when it fails, sending shrapnel flying in a switching yard.

“Had we had voltage stability monitoring in 2003, we wouldn’t have had the U.S.-Canada blackout,” Silverstein said. “Had we had phase angle monitoring, we wouldn’t have had the blackout.”

Most of the 2,500 PMUs installed nationwide were funded by the federal government under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act following the 2008 financial crisis.

“In the last year or two, companies are seeing so much value that they no longer have to be bribed with federal grants,” Silverstein said. “SPP is rushing to get their blanks filled in.”

But Silverstein said the value of the sensors has been undermined by the reluctance of PMU owners to share their data. “There’s a lot more we could get done if we could get good, solid data sharing,” she said.