By William Opalka

NORTH FALMOUTH, Mass. — Having spent 45 years running transmission grids, former NYISO CEO Stephen Whitley is an infrastructure guy.

Whitley, who retired last October after seven years at the ISO, emphasized the importance of wires and pipelines in his keynote speech Wednesday at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s 23rd Annual New England Energy Conference.

He reflected on his career, which also included 30 years of operations and management positions at the Tennessee Valley Authority before he moved to the Northeast. His personal highlight reel seemed to be a solid string of crisis management. Nuclear shutdowns at TVA in the late 1980s. The 2003 blackout. A horrific New England cold snap in 2004. Hurricane Sandy. The polar vortex.

“It seemed like these problems followed me around,” he joked.

A common theme was “the need for transmission” to navigate through these near-disasters.

Five-Year Shutdown

In 1985, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered shutdowns of the Brown’s Ferry plant in Alabama and the Sequoya station in Tennessee over safety concerns.

“It was 6,000 MW of capacity and we thought it would be three or four months, but it turned out to be five years,” he said.

The TVA hydro system simultaneously suffered through two droughts, so 4,000 MW of hydropower were reduced to 2,500 MW for much of that time, causing “a few tough years.”

“The way we got through it most of the time was through the transmission grid,” Whitley said.

Whitley said the system survived through imports from areas with greater fuel diversity, an experience that would be repeated in his later jobs in New England and New York.

7,000 MW out of Service

In 2004, New England — less reliant on natural gas for power generation than it is now — suffered through five days with minus 10-degree temperatures and 45-mph winds, recalled Whitley, who was ISO-NE’s chief operating officer at the time. “One day I went to the control room and one of the operators told me we had 7,000 MW of power plants that couldn’t come online.”

The crisis was eased when some New York generators switched to oil-fired generation, which freed up some gas pipeline capacity.

“That’s when you see it’s not just the electric system that is so important, it’s the infrastructure of the gas supply system and the diversity of the generation capacity,” Whitley said.

Transmission, fuel diversity and imports also got NYISO through Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the polar vortex in early 2014.

Whitley said he worries the next crisis could result from the Northeast’s switch to “all renewables and gas” without, he says, adequate infrastructure to support it. He said the recent suspension of the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline was disappointing. (See Kinder Morgan Board Suspends Work on Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline.)

Without diverse energy supplies and robust infrastructure, he said, the system will be stressed.

“Each region is going to have to be more capable of carrying its own load,” Whitley said. “As all these coal plants shut down, there just isn’t going to that much surplus available.”