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November 19, 2024

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California Labor, (Possibly) Public Power to Sponsor Pathways Legislation

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A representative of one of the staunchest opponents of past efforts to transform CAISO into an RTO said his labor union plans to sponsor the California legislation needed to implement the “Step 2” proposal of the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative.

On top of that, another previous objector to CAISO “regionalization” — a coalition of California’s publicly owned utilities — signaled it might sign on as co-sponsor.

“I am very happy to say that we will be sponsoring the bill in the next California legislative session to implement the Pathways proposal for the CAISO and for the California utilities,” Marc Joseph, an attorney representing the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), said Oct. 30 during a panel discussion at the CAISO Stakeholder Symposium in Sacramento.

Joseph noted he’d sat on the stage at the same CAISO event eight years earlier to voice concern about the first of three attempts to regionalize the ISO through bills that would’ve transformed the California grid operator into an independent entity by eliminating the state’s role in appointing its Board of Governors.

“This would mean that all of the functions of the CAISO would be removed from California control with no idea what would happen to them, and no chance for California to go back if we didn’t like the outcome,” Joseph said. “The legislature was in effect being asked to mortgage the farm with nothing more than ‘trust us’ as collateral.”

That approach was “a particular problem” for California labor groups because the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) is “anchored” in the CAISO balancing authority area, requiring that a certain portion of new renewables be built in-state and directly interconnected to that BAA.

“If the CAISO became the RTO for the West, that could mean that the balancing authority area would be the entire West, and that would mean that the RPS structure would effectively be meaningless and most of the jobs for people in California would probably be exported to other states,” Joseph said.

The Pathways proposal is different, he said, because it proposes to create a new independent “regional organization” to govern rules for CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM) and Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) while leaving the ISO’s BAA intact, a point Joseph and other labor representatives have emphasized previously, including in front of California lawmakers. (See Pathways Initiative Releases ‘Step 2’ Proposal for Western ‘RO’ and California Labor Groups Affirm Support for Pathways Proposal.)

Heading off questions about the bill’s legislative author and its specific language, Joseph jokingly said: “Cool your jets. This is still October. It’s only been 30 days since the governor finished signing the bills from the last legislative session. We are ahead of schedule, and we’ll get to all of those things in due time.”

‘This is for Real’

When Joseph told Randy Howard, general manager of the Northern California Power Agency (NCPA), that IBEW planned to sponsor the Pathways bill, Howard said his first question was, “Who’s the author?”

“And I said, ‘I think we’d be interested in co-sponsoring,’ which is a big shift for us in public power,” Howard said during the same panel.

NCPA represents 16 publicly owned utilities (POUs) in California, which are responsible for scheduling about 12% of the energy delivered into CAISO. Howard said public power’s position on previous CAISO regionalization efforts largely aligned with that of labor.

“When we’ve looked at previous proposals related to an RTO — and the legislation, similar to [Joseph], we saw many more risks than we could identify benefits. And again, once you hand over the keys to the organization, you couldn’t take them back,” he said.

Howard said that, for public power, years of regional collaboration through CAISO’s WEIM eased utilities’ distrust stemming from the Western energy crisis of 2000/01. NCPA members prefer an “incremental” approach to developing a Western market, which the Pathways proposal continues to accommodate, he said.

As nonprofits, Howard said POUs are concerned primarily about maintaining reliability while keeping costs down. And while the publics would like to own all of their resources, that’s not practical, he said, and participation in a broader day-ahead market like EDAM would provide access to a greater pool of resources at a lower cost.

“And by having this more efficient market and the market platform, we should be able to continue to add these emission-free resources and do it in a way that we can share them across the West with each other, diversify greater and try to keep the rates more affordable for our ratepayers, because that’s what we think is the most important thing,” Howard said.

Panel moderator Kathleen Staks, executive director of Western Freedom and co-chair of the Pathways Launch Committee, remarked about the progress the initiative has made in the year since it was formally launched.

“I think it has really sort of sunk in for us, [and] for the audiences that we’ve been talking with, that this is very real. This is a real proposal, and now we’ve just made it even more real,” Staks said.

Speaking a week earlier on a panel at the fall joint meeting of the Committee on Regional Electric Power Cooperation and Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Body (CREPC-WIRAB), Staks said she was “cautiously optimistic” about passage of the Pathways bill.

Reached for comment on the floor of the symposium, Joseph told RTO Insider he sees “nothing uniquely challenging” about passing the Pathways bill compared with “any other substantial bill.”

“In fact, because there is such widespread support for it, I think there’s every reason for it to be successful,” he said. “The single most important fact is that the leading opponents to prior rounds — labor and POUs — are now potentially sponsoring,” he said.

Joseph confirmed the legislation will be introduced during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

And he reiterated the point made by Staks.

“The level of engagement is an indication that everybody recognizes this is for real.”

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EPA Announces Nearly $3B for Clean Port Equipment

EPA on Oct. 29 announced it will disburse $2.9 billion in grants to U.S. port authorities to purchase zero-emission equipment, vehicles and on-site electricity generators through its Clean Ports Program.

The agency said the funds would support the purchase of 1,500 units of cargo-handling equipment, 1,000 drayage trucks, 10 locomotives and 20 vessels, along with battery-electric and hydrogen vehicle charging and fueling infrastructure, and solar power generation. It estimates the equipment and infrastructure will prevent more than 3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, 12,000 short tons of NOx and 200 short tons of PM2.5 in the first 10 years of operation.

EPA selected 55 state, city and county agencies across the continental U.S. and in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Most are shipping ports along the coasts, but the awardees also included several agencies overseeing inland intermodal terminals, such as in Dallas and Salt Lake City.

While “ports are vital to the U.S. economy,” the agency said, “the port and freight equipment responsible for moving goods including trucks, locomotives, marine vessels, and cargo-handling equipment contribute to significant levels of diesel air pollution at and near port facilities. This pollution is especially harmful to nearby communities’ health and contributes to climate change.”

“Delivering cleaner technologies and resources to U.S. ports will slash harmful air and climate pollution while protecting people who work in and live nearby ports communities,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

The largest winners were Los Angeles and the Port of Virginia, which were granted more than $411 million and about $380 million, respectively. EPA said applicants “were evaluated in part on their workforce development efforts, to ensure that projects will expand access to high-quality jobs.”

The Maryland Port Administration and Department of Transportation received more than $147 million for equipment at the Port of Baltimore, where President Joe Biden spoke on Oct. 29 to celebrate the awards.

“For too long, [ports] have run on fossil fuels and aging infrastructure, putting workers at risk and exposing nearby communities to dangerous pollution,” the president said. “The new $3 billion in funding we’re delivering today will help ports all across America … strengthen supply chains, make American businesses more competitive and keep consumer prices down while slashing carbon pollution.”

Biden took the opportunity to praise state and federal efforts to clear the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and reopen the port. “We won’t stop until the new bridge is finished completely,” he said. “Finished, finished, finished. I call on Congress to fully fund it, this year!”

The president was joined by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, whom he said “may be the best governor in the country,” and the state’s U.S. senators, Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, the latter of whom he called “Sen. Van Halen.”

“What the hell is his name? He’s new,” Biden joked after the gaffe.

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BOEM, DOD to Coordinate on Offshore Wind

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The U.S. Department of Defense and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have reached a memorandum of understanding intended to improve the collaboration of offshore wind power development proposals. 

The move is intended to address one of the frustrations common to offshore wind development and countless other endeavors: the need to work across multiple government agencies that operate independently of one another, or sometimes even at cross purposes. 

While DOD is just one of many governmental entities, it exerts a particularly strong influence on decision-making. Offshore wind development has been paused indefinitely off parts of the Maryland and Virginia coastlines because of potential conflict with the heavy military activity there. 

BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein and Brendan Owens — assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment — formalized the agreement between their two agencies at the close of the first day of American Clean Power’s Offshore Windpower conference Oct. 29. 

Owens emphasized the commonality between the two agencies. 

“The other hat that I get to wear in the job that I have at DOD right now is chief sustainability officer,” he said. “So there’s a tremendous convergence of what the Biden administration is asking all of its federal agencies to do, and the work that you all are doing and the work that DOD is doing.” 

ACP CEO Jason Grumet spoke of the imperative of collaboration as developers try to unite disparate groups of stakeholders and the challenges that presents. 

“Anyone who has actually spent time in federal service knows that one of the most challenging collaborations is among federal agencies,” Grumet said. “One of the things that I think really has marked this administration has been a remarkable amount of coordination and collaboration in a whole-of-government understanding of what it’s going to take to manage and balance our energy and environmental needs.” 

Almost all power for DOD facilities comes from outside those facilities, Owens said, so the military has a direct interest in the grid from a mission capability standpoint. “If we can flex from one source to another, that gives us resilience for our mission, and that’s the reason that we view the deployment of offshore wind critically as something that needs to be accelerated.” 

But not, he said, at the expense of training and readiness. “So DOD and BOEM have worked together to identify … and avoid impacts to national security for offshore energy planning,” Owens said, “and this MOU codifies the way that we will do that going forward.” 

“The MOU helps to define and clarify roles and duties of both of our organizations in leasing and project planning processes,” Klein said. 

In a news release, BOEM said the MOU expands on a 1983 memorandum of agreement on their activities in the Outer Continental Shelf. 

The announcement flagged four key goals: 

    • find mutual solutions that support renewable energy in a manner compatible with essential military operations; 
    • collaborate as early as possible in the offshore wind leasing process; 
    • regularly communicate and exchange information at the staff and leadership levels; and 
    • determine what areas should be deferred from leasing to enable the performance of DOD activities on the OCS. 
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NV Energy Explains EDAM Choice

NV Energy’s decision to join CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) rather than SPP’s Markets+ was based partly on concerns that participation in the latter would “lead to substantial expenditures with limited results,” a representative of the Nevada utility said.

In contrast, NV Energy has “high confidence” that EDAM’s first-movers will stand up the market and it will have the connectivity to produce customer benefits, according to David Rubin, the utility’s federal energy policy director.

Rubin was speaking Oct. 28 at a meeting of Nevada’s Regional Transmission Coordination Task Force to give an update on the utility’s day-ahead market activities.

The RTCTF was created by 2021’s Senate Bill 448, which also requires transmission providers in the state to join an RTO by Jan. 1, 2030.

In May, NV Energy confirmed in public statements and regulatory filings that it intends to ask the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) for authorization to join EDAM. (See NV Energy Confirms Intent to Join CAISO’s EDAM.)

The decision is viewed as an important victory for EDAM because of NV Energy’s central location in CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM).

Rubin showed a diagram with dark blue circles depicting balancing areas expected to participate in EDAM, including PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Idaho Power and the Balancing Authority of Northern California.

Expanding that footprint to include other WEIM entities would provide even greater benefits to participants, Rubin said. But even if the footprint doesn’t widen from what’s now expected, “the dark blue footprint with its connectivity should produce extensive benefits,” he said.

A Brattle Group study for NV Energy showed that footprint contains 46% of WECC’s load, 80% of the solar generation, 70% of the storage capacity and much of the wind power, Rubin said.

It projected that the utility’s annual benefits with EDAM would range from $62 million to $149 million, depending on the market footprint. In contrast, results from Markets+ participation would range from a $17 million annual loss to a $16 million gain. (See NV Energy to Reap More from EDAM than Markets+, Report Shows.)

Stakeholder Role

Another factor NV Energy weighed in its day-ahead market decision was the role of stakeholder participation.

In EDAM, CAISO staff work to balance positions expressed by stakeholders, Rubin said, while Markets+ employs a stakeholder-led process in which staff are more passive.

Rubin said that when NV Energy participated in the SPP process, Northwest entities tended to vote as a block while Southwest entities often varied in their opinions. As a result, NV Energy was frequently outvoted, he said.

In CAISO’s process for EDAM, “staff involvement helps protect minority interests that can get overruled by SPP’s deterministic voting structure,” Rubin said.

CAISO’s process also makes greater use of written comments, he said, which allow stakeholders to more fully explain their positions. And the written comments can be reviewed by those who weren’t able to attend a meeting.

Building on WEIM Benefits

By joining EDAM, NV Energy can build on the substantial benefits it has earned through participating in WEIM since December 2015.

CAISO announced Oct. 28 that overall WEIM benefits have grown to $6.25 billion; NV Energy has seen cumulative benefits of $589 million through the third quarter of 2024.

Rubin said NV Energy’s WEIM benefits have grown appreciably as the company has gained experience in the market and its footprint has expanded. Those benefits have helped bolster NV Energy’s confidence in EDAM.

In contrast, “we have less confidence in Markets+, even if entities spend the $150 million necessary to build out the SPP design,” he said.

NV Energy expects to file a request for authorization to join EDAM with the PUCN in the second quarter of 2025. That timing will give the company time to complete its integrated resource plan filed with the commission and see how the footprints evolve for the two competing day-ahead markets.

There also may be reactions by then to PacifiCorp’s open access transmission tariff for its participation in EDAM, expected to be filed with FERC in November, as well as a potential PGE filing in January.

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Panelists Discuss Electric, Election Security Intersections

MINNEAPOLIS — With widespread security concerns over next week’s U.S. presidential election and the Canadian federal elections in 2025, panelists at last week’s GridSecCon said the institutions serving electric reliability are “absolutely critical” for ensuring the elections remain safe and secure. 

The Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC), which co-sponsored the 13th annual conference with the Midwest Reliability Organization, decided to hold an election security panel after repeated warnings about the “complex and dynamic” threat landscape facing U.S. and Canadian election infrastructure, according to E-ISAC Vice President of Security Operations and Intelligence Matt Duncan.  

“It’s more than just a presidential election that can be influenced,” Duncan said, reminding the audience of warnings from security experts and the federal government about cyber campaigns by foreign adversaries including China and Iran. (See Agencies Describe a Year of Iran Cyber Attacks.) “We have very close races in the House and Senate and state houses across the country, and our adversaries know that.” 

The links between election security and grid security go beyond the fact that both are critically important, panelists said. Timothy Davis, senior elections cyber threat analyst at the Elections Infrastructure ISAC (EI-ISAC), observed that threat actors “use a lot of similar tactics, no matter who they’re targeting,” which means security professionals in both sectors can share their experiences to strengthen each other. 

Spencer Wood, an election security adviser for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said physical security is as important as electronic hygiene. Describing the “horrid amounts of violence and rhetoric” that he has seen directed against election workers across the country, Wood added that state officials also need to be prepared for disruptions to the grid — both deliberate and accidental. 

“There will be power outages on election day. A squirrel will decide to jump on a transformer. There will be a tree that will fall somewhere, or an accident that will happen, or at a polling location, someone will plug in a Crock-Pot, and that will be enough to trip the breakers at the polling location,” Wood said. “That’s why you … have an incident response plan. But really the … trusted source of information is the state and local election officials.” 

Davis agreed with Wood’s recommendation for incident response plans, saying he and his colleagues at the EI-ISAC “hammer those over and over again.” Knowing whom to contact — especially on Election Day — is essential to resolve issues as quickly as possible. He said electric utilities should feel as comfortable interacting with the EI-ISAC as they do with its counterpart in their sector. 

Brandi Martin, assistant director of the Energy Security Policy and Partnerships team at the Department of Energy, said utilities should be prepared to coordinate with federal officials as well. She reminded attendees that a well-organized response plan can summon responses from a wide range of organizations, as happened during the recent reactions to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. 

“We have a lot of these practiced mechanisms, whether it’s a wildfire … hurricane, or polar vortex. So on Election Day, if we have a weather event, a cyber event or a physical event, we’re ready there to stand up those coordination calls and mechanisms as well,” Martin said. 

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Gulf of Maine OSW Auction Results in Four Leases Worth $21.9M

The first-ever offshore wind lease auction for the Gulf of Maine resulted in the sale of four offshore lease areas to two developers, bringing in a total of about $21.9 million.

The auction offered eight lease areas in total, with the potential to provide 13 GW of power. (See BOEM Announces Gulf of Maine Offshore Wind Lease Sale.) The four sold lease areas could host enough offshore wind generation to power 2.3 million homes, the U.S. Department of the Interior said in the Oct. 29 announcement.

Avangrid Renewables and Invenergy NE Offshore Wind each provisionally won two lease areas, which range in size from 97,854 acres to 124,897 acres.

Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said the company’s leases provide for the potential development of about 3 GW of floating offshore wind.

“Securing these lease areas provides a unique opportunity to advance our growing business at a significant value and reinforces our unwavering commitment to helping the New England region meet its growing need for reliable, clean energy,” Azagra said.

“With today’s lease sale building on earlier deepwater auctions on the West Coast, the United States is truly on track to become a global leader in floating offshore wind technology,” said Anne Reynolds, vice president for offshore wind at American Clean Power.

While all commercial offshore wind farms currently under construction or in operation in the U.S. feature fixed-foundation technology, farms developed in the deeper waters in the Gulf of Maine will need to rely on floating technology.

Although floating offshore wind technology is in its early stages — the world’s largest floating installation has an 88-MW nameplate capacity — its development will be key to meeting state and federal clean energy goals, due to the limited availability of viable fixed-bottom locations.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in August approved a floating wind research lease for the state of Maine, which eventually could provide the state with 144 MW of offshore wind. (See Maine Approved for Floating Wind Research Lease.)

The $21.9-million price tag is significantly less than BOEM’s 2022 California lease sale, which also was centered around floating technology. The California leases, which cover a smaller overall footprint than the Gulf of Maine leases, brought in $757 million. (See First West Coast Offshore Wind Auction Fetches $757M.)

The offshore wind industry’s struggles to scale up over the past two years may have cooled bidder interest in new lease areas. An Oregon offshore wind lease auction scheduled for Oct. 15 was postponed due to a lack of interest from potential bidders, while BOEM canceled a Gulf of Mexico auction planned for September. (See BOEM Postpones Oregon Offshore Wind Auction and BOEM Cancels Gulf of Mexico Wind Lease Auction.)

Avangrid’s lease areas (OCS-564 and OCS-568) are located about 34 miles from Massachusetts and feature “strong wind speeds” along with “relatively shallow waters within the limits of existing floating wind technology” and multiple potential interconnection points, Avangrid said.

While Avangrid’s lease areas are located adjacent to each other east of Massachusetts, Invenergy’s lease areas bookend the northeast and southeast corners of the wind energy area. Invenergy’s southern lease (OCS-567) is located about 25 miles east of Massachusetts, while its northern lease (OCS-562) is located southeast of Portland, Maine, about 53 miles offshore.

Reynolds specifically praised Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) for the state’s “proactive approach to floating offshore wind technology.”

In 2023, Maine passed legislation (LD 1895) authorizing the procurement of at least 3,000 MW of offshore wind power “in proximate federal waters” by the end of 2040. The law directs the Governor’s Energy Office to submit its first solicitation to the Public Utilities Commission by July 2025, with the PUC set to issue a request for proposals in January 2026.

Massachusetts also is well located to purchase power from the Gulf of Maine areas, and the state has indicated it will need to procure at least 10 GW of power from offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine to meet its climate targets.

Developers recently broke ground on a new offshore wind terminal in the city of Salem, Massachusetts, which is located in relatively close proximity to the southern Gulf of Maine lease areas. (See Mass. Breaks Ground on Salem Offshore Wind Terminal.)

The availability of future leases in the area could be affected by the outcome of the presidential election in November, as Republican nominee Donald Trump has expressed hostility toward offshore wind. The Department of the Interior has another lease auction scheduled for the Gulf of Maine in 2028.

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Federal Judge Tosses Out Texas’ ROFR Law in Non-ERCOT Regions

A federal judge found Texas’ law instituting a state right of first refusal (ROFR) law violates the Commerce Clause and prohibited its enforcement in non-ERCOT regions, in an order issued Oct. 28. 

Judge Robert Pitman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in Austin handed down the ruling on remand from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of NextEra Energy Capital Holdings v. Kathleen Jackson in her official capacity as a commissioner of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. (See 5th Circuit Finds in Favor of NextEra’s ROFR Appeal.) 

The 5th Circuit decision also was appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to take up the case in December 2023. (See SCOTUS Won’t Take up Texas Appeal of ROFR Law.) 

The Texas Legislature passed SB 1938 after FERC Order 1000 removed federal ROFRs but required ISO/RTOs such as MISO and SPP, which serve the parts of Texas in the Eastern Interconnection, to respect state ROFR laws. 

The law caused NextEra to lose a transmission project in East Texas that it had won in MISO’s competitive planning process and another project it had tried to buy from an incumbent in SPP’s territory.  

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. State laws can get around it if they have legitimate policy reasons. But the judge knocked down all the arguments ROFR supporters brought up in the case. 

Texas claimed the law codified existing practices. But NextEra was able to build in the state prior to enactment of the ROFR law, as it did in the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone law. Another justification was to clean up statutory language after the CREZ lines were opened to out-of-state firms. The judge found that was not a valid reason to get around the Commerce Clause. 

Texas also wanted to avoid federal rate regulation, but the judge shot down that reasoning. 

“Balkanizing a state from interstate commerce is the very problem the Commerce Clause is meant to guard against … and so Texas’ desire to avoid the interstate market — and the federal regulation that comes with it — is not a legitimate local interest,” the court ruling said. 

The final reason was an alleged impact to reliability because the competitive bidding process adds time to transmission development. But SPP transmission lines that are needed quickly can get around the competitive process. And MISO does not have a competitive process for lines that are needed solely for reliability. 

“The federal bidding process does not undermine reliability by substantially delaying projects because these projects already take years to plan,” the court ruling said. “The type of transmission lines defendants are concerned about are proposed through federal regional planning bodies to promote long-term transmission development. Even without a competitive bidding process, the procedure for identifying those types of regionally planned transmission lines is time consuming.” 

Texas can ensure reliability with the PUC’s certificate process, and the regulator continues to have authority when lines are in service to ensure they are operated reliably, the judge said. 

“If those processes are insufficient to ensure reliability, then Texas could enact new laws that add reliability mandates,” the decision said. “The constitutional solution to Texas’ issue of ensuring reliability is to evenhandedly increase reliability standards, not to treat all out-of-state entities as necessarily unreliable.”

When it comes to competitive processes, FERC requires transmission planners to consider reliability. MISO found NextEra’s proposal for the Hartburg-Sabine project had adequate plans and infrastructure in place to ensure reliable operation. NextEra has a pending case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to try to get that project back, though MISO and FERC have since said it is no longer needed. 

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EPRI Launches DCFlex Initiative to Help Integrate Data Centers on the Grid

The Electric Power Research Institute has launched its “DCFlex” initiative that will explore how data centers can support the grid, enable better asset use and support the clean energy transition.

The initiative’s founding members include Compass Datacenters, Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, ERCOT, Google, Meta, New York Power Authority, NRG Energy, NVIDIA, Pacific Gas and Electric, PJM Interconnection, Portland General Electric, QTS Data Centers, Southern Company and Vistra.

DCFlex will coordinate real-world demonstrations of flexibility in a variety of existing and planned data centers and electricity markets, creating reference architectures and providing shared learnings to enable broader adoption of flexible operations that benefit consumers.

The EPRI initiative announced Oct. 29 will set up five to 10 flexibility hubs, demonstrating strategies that enable operational and deployment flexibility, streamline grid integration and transition backup power solutions to grid assets. Demonstration deployment will start in the first half of 2025 with testing running through 2027.

“One of the key areas where people are talking a lot, but not doing a lot, is the area of understanding how flexible data centers can be, and how we actually make that happen,” EPRI’s Principal Technical Executive Tom Wilson said in an interview. “And so that was the motivation.”

EPRI is a nonprofit that works to address challenges in the energy industry. The DCFlex initiative was born out of discussions at the U.S. Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board about how it could help power data centers. EPRI spoke with 50 experts from the power industry and the data center industry, Wilson said.

Data centers can respond to signals in the grid in two ways — some of their computational tasks can be shifted around in time and to other data centers, and backup power generation at the facilities can be used instead of the grid, Wilson said. Diesel generation dominates their backup power now, but cleaner options more regularly could respond to grid signals without violating state air permits.

“In terms of computational flexibility, I’d say, you know, if you’re at an ATM trying to get money out, and you get the answer that you can’t get your cash until the electricity prices are lower or there’s more electricity available, you won’t be happy,” Wilson said. “And so, there are a lot of functions of data centers that you do have to have real time. Basically the customer-facing things that data centers do. Other things like indexing the web and activities like that are potentially more flexible in where they occur and when they occur.”

The customer-facing aspects of artificial intelligence also need to be ready for use whenever, but AI models require training, and that energy-intensive process can be shifted in time, Wilson said.

Google, for example, has shifted computing demand to where cheap, clean power is available at its different data centers for the past five years, he added.

“At Google, we see this moment as a generational opportunity for the public and private sector to work together to meet energy demand responsibly and unlock significant benefits for people, the economy and the planet,” Google’s Global Head of Energy Market Development and Innovation Caroline Golin said in a statement. “Through the leadership, expertise and convening power of EPRI, DCFlex will be an important collaboration vehicle to align our common goals, as we work together to build a stronger electrical grid for all.”

Data centers have helped transform the demand for power. The U.S. had flat growth for roughly two decades, but with data centers being added in the hundreds of megawatts, reshoring of industry and efforts to electrify other uses of energy, that has changed dramatically in the past year, Wilson said.

It used to be easy to plug a data center into the grid, but the growing demand has slowed the process. In 2022, Dominion put a moratorium on new connections in its territory, which includes the largest concentration of data centers in the world, called Data Center Alley in Loudon County, Va., Wilson said.

A 500-MW data center is equivalent to tens of thousands of homes being added to the grid much more quickly than more granular demand growth from an expanding population or a growing economy. Flexibility can help the grid absorb major new loads more quickly.

“In many cases, if you have transmission issues, it may just be that I can provide the power you want for 350 days a year,” Wilson said. “For 15, I can’t guarantee it for every hour in those days because of congestion, peak temperatures or higher, low — different issues. And if you have that response, is there a way to get around providing that powerful 15 days for the data centers in order to connect it now?”

When it comes to data flexibility, being able to dial back the demand from a 500-MW data center offers a significant source of demand response for the grid, he added.

“Or if it’s able to turn on backup generation and take its load entirely off the grid, that’s a huge amount of capacity that can come online,” Wilson said. “Historically, we’ve seen this with aluminum smelters and other large industry right where they’ve traditionally gotten a phone call that said, ‘can you guys turn off these hours, these days?’”

Another key is better planning around when and where data centers want to connect to the grid, said Wilson. It takes time to stand up a new data center.

“Better coordinating those ramp up schedules is really important for an understanding where both parties really are in terms of their needs and ability to respond,” Wilson said. “Because, you know, if you’re talking a gigawatt data center or 500-MW data center that’s a large amount of load, and it can be in over eight years or three years or two years. It makes a big difference.”

Constellation, which has worked with Microsoft to reopen a Three Mile Island nuclear plant to serve a Microsoft data center and has discussed co-locating data centers at its other nuclear plants, welcomed EPRI’s initiative.

“Data centers are integral to our daily lives, economy and national security,” Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said in a statement. “Our energy system is built to handle the extreme demands of our hottest summer days and coldest winter nights but is often underutilized. The real challenge isn’t a lack of energy for data centers but managing the peak demand hours. The ability of data centers to flex during these critical periods is crucial.”

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MISO and TVA Strike Emergency Energy Purchase Agreement, Request FERC OK

MISO and the Tennessee Valley Authority hope to implement an emergency energy purchase framework by Christmas Eve.  

The two have filed an agreement before FERC for permission to be able to transact energy with one another during emergencies by Dec. 24 (ER25-197).  

MISO and TVA have never had an agreement to mutually supply the other with emergency power, and they said they traditionally had “other arrangements” that seemed sufficient to meet the needs of their regions.  

However, the two said the late December 2022 winter storm changed their views. 

“Due to the changing configuration of the grid and recent emergency events, like Winter Storm Elliott, MISO and TVA have become increasingly focused on the need for additional coordination and planning to better ensure reliability in an emergency,” MISO Managing Senior Corporate Counsel Amy Thurmond wrote to FERC in a transmittal letter. “To that end, each has identified the need to purchase emergency energy from the other to maintain the reliability of each individual transmission system and, more generally, the integrity of the Eastern Interconnection.”  

MISO and TVA have contemplated an agreement since MISO supplied up to 5 GW at times during the storm Dec. 23, 2022, to the Tennessee Valley Authority, SPP, Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. and the Southeast planning region. MISO’s exports that day played a role in forcing its own maximum generation event. After, MISO leadership lamented that though MISO could assist TVA during dire straits, TVA was prohibited from returning the favor when MISO encountered precarious operations. (See MISO, TVA to Enter Agreement on Emergency Purchases and MISO Defends Energy Exports During December Storm.)  

TVA’s ability to provide power to parties outside of its service territory is limited by the TVA Act. The federal utility can supply power only to parties that held exchange power arrangements as of July 1, 1957, and their successors. TVA for years interpreted the TVA Act as a barricade to selling power directly to MISO.  

MISO is less restricted in the balancing authorities it can sell to or purchase emergency energy from. The RTO’s tariff requires only that there be an agreement between MISO and another BA.  

MISO noted that two of TVA’s neighboring electric systems included in the 1957 agreement — Ameren and Entergy — joined MISO years ago. MISO and TVA share a seam in Mississippi and along the Arkansas-Tennessee state line.  

Ameren and Entergy as Avenues for Trade

The freshly filed agreement involves Ameren and Entergy granting authority to MISO to act on their behalf to buy emergency energy from TVA. MISO said the emergency energy it coordinates and directs from TVA on behalf of Entergy and Ameren would be used for the “sole purpose of maintaining electric reliability.” 

Terms of the agreement stipulate that TVA and MISO can share power up to the transfer limits in use between the two when one is experiencing an emergency. The two said supply to the other shouldn’t come at the expense of the “safe and proper operation” of their own transmission systems and service to their own customers and shouldn’t impede obligations they might have with other parties.  

MISO and TVA said one or the other should be experiencing a NERC-defined Energy Emergency Alert Level 2 before an offer to supply emergency energy can be made. Offers would be recallable up to 10 minutes ahead of time, and MISO and TVA said they would make efforts to ensure that an emergency energy transaction “continues only until it can be replaced by a commercial transaction.” All emergency energy transactions would be metered and billed based on scheduled deliveries. Emergency energy charges from the delivering BA to the receiving BA would be calculated based on a two-part formula that includes an energy portion and any transmission charges to an agreed-upon delivery point.  

When MISO was the delivering BA, the rate per megawatt hour would be either 150% of the hourly locational marginal price at the buses near the point of exit, 110% of the verifiable cost of the resources used to supply the power or $100/MWh, whichever is greater. When TVA was delivering megawatts, the rate similarly would be the greatest of either 150% of the hourly LMP at the points of injection in either the Ameren or Entergy service territory, 110% of the verifiable cost of the resources used to supply the power or $100/MWh.  

MISO and TVA plan to use an invoice system with rules that allow one or the other to collect interest on delinquent payments or raise billing disputes. MISO added that though it would be sourcing emergency energy on behalf of Ameren and Entergy, under no circumstances would the two members be liable for the RTO’s obligations under the agreement.  

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Changing Dynamics of Clean Energy Transition Debated at Aurora Energy Conference

NEW YORK — Despite some recent hiccups with supply chains and higher interest rates, the clean energy transition is set to accelerate with long-term policy support, panelists said Oct. 24 at the Aurora Energy Transition Forum. 

The offshore wind industry in the U.S. has had issues with project delays and cancellations and the recent construction accident at Vineyard Wind 1, but the industry has moved projects through the permitting process, and construction is due to pick up soon, Vineyard Offshore CEO Alicia Barton said. 

“We’ve seen setbacks, no doubt about it,” Barton said. “When we look ahead, though, over the next — and I’m not talking like the 10 years; I’m talking about 2025 — we are going to see something like 8 GW of projects actively under construction in the United States.” 

The industry is starting to put steel into the Outer Continental Shelf, but it already has gotten eight to 10 projects through the permitting process, and it will start sending significant power to the grid in two to three years. 

“We actually are seeing this industry, I think, at a very different scale,” Barton said. “And I think that actually does get lost, even on people that are spending all their time on energy, because you hear so much negative news about offshore wind.” 

Some projects have had to cancel their initial contracts, but they have been able to sign new ones for higher returns because many of the East Coast states supporting offshore wind need the power, Barton said. 

“In New England, increasingly, there is a recognition that offshore wind is the resource that will address long-term winter reliability,” she added. “But of course, we need to start showing up sooner … in terms of the number of years that it has taken thus far to get projects done.” 

Solar and batteries have come to dominate interconnection queues, but the economic issues of the past few years have impacted them as well, as 2022 and 2023 saw slight price increases because of the supply chain, said Samuel Scroggins, managing director of Lazard’s Global Power, Energy & Infrastructure Group, which tracks the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for different generation technologies in annual reports.

The latest LCOE numbers declined slightly, though the days of regular cost declines are in the past. 

“The costs have come down so much for wind and solar in particular that we’re at a point now where there needs to be some incremental technology advancement to see continued cost decline,” Scroggins said. “The model is relatively straightforward. The inputs are pretty clear.” 

Bringing down capital expenditure is getting difficult because the industry already has used many of the best sites, so those that remain are not the “nice, flat, square” pieces of land that are easy to develop, he added. 

The Inflation Reduction Act has given financers and developers a long enough runway to get projects with 10 years of certainty for tax subsidies, which in the past sunsetted much sooner than that, said Allan Marks, a partner with law firm Milbank. It has spread the money around enough that the policy likely will survive regardless of what happens in the elections Nov. 5. 

“If you look at congressional districts, two out of the three jobs created in the manufacturing plants are in red or red-leaning congressional seats,” Marks said. “So, there are good reasons why 18 Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to the speaker and said, ‘Please do not repeal IRA.’” 

While the money likely still will flow from tax credits, the White House switching parties would lead to changes on how the law is implemented with changes at federal agencies, he added. 

Nora Mead Brownell, co-founder of consultancy Espy Energy Solutions and a former FERC commissioner, also noted the IRA’s funding of major projects in conservative states gives it staying power, but she also argued that other policies need changes. 

“We did not change the regulatory model at the federal and the state level,” Brownell said. “We are not rewarding the right things. We have evasive utilities who are terrified of change, who are not introducing their own solutions [and] adding technology efficiency that would give more transparency.” 

That can change with the rate structure of utilities, with Brownell saying performance-based rates should be widely adopted to encourage utilities. 

“We reward great, honking projects that may or may not solve the solution,” Brownell said. “We do not reward innovation. We do not allow people to take risks. We do not enforce data to be shared with people who could create those demand response programs, both at the commercial and retail level, that could make a huge difference.” 

Ideally, more power over the industry would be shifted to the federal level, and states would have more uniform rules because a patchwork makes things harder, she said. 

“I think we have to have a larger conversation about, ‘Yes, this is going to be expensive, but we’re making it more expensive,’ and we need to speak in terms that real people can understand,” Brownell said. 

The Rapid Growth of Batteries in the 2020s

Just a few years ago, the grid hardly had any storage capacity, but now it makes up about 40% of the queues across the country, with significant deployments in CAISO and ERCOT, Jupiter Power CEO Andy Bowman said. 

“It’s become the kind of firm dispatch that we have traditionally looked for natural gas plants to provide,” Bowman said. “And I think the growth opportunity for storage increasingly is not as some kind of ancillary renewable technology; it is for firm clean power. Firm clean power that can be dispatched very quickly. Firm green power that can provide a lot of valuable grid services.” 

Years ago the price for batteries was $4,000/kW, which made them irrelevant, but by 2019 that came down to $400/kW, said Spearmint CEO Andrew Waranch. With tax subsidies and plenty of financing available, the price of a 100-MW, two-hour battery in Texas is down to just $10 million. 

“I’ve always said that batteries will be as prevalent as cell phone towers,” Waranch said. “They will be everywhere. They’ll be on every corner. Because even if they’re big or they’re small, they’re affordable. And when you look at how they compete with other assets, relative to CTs [combustion turbines], they’re cheaper, faster, cleaner and stronger and a lot quicker to build.” 

So far, batteries have had major impacts in California and Texas, Bowman said. 

“California, as with just about every new energy technology, leads the way,” he said. “Texas comes in close behind, surpasses them, and I think we’ll be doing that shortly with batteries.” 

But with how quickly the grid is changing and how disruptive batteries have become, Bowman expects energy storage assets will start to grow in every market eventually. Jupiter is working in MISO, ISO-NE, NYISO and PJM on changes that will help grow and integrate batteries into their systems. 

Spearmint is building 1,200 MW of batteries in ERCOT, but its largest development portfolio is in MISO because it and SPP have the most acute needs for the technology now. 

“If they’re telling you that they’re unsolvable in a few years from now, you usually want to listen,” Waranch said. “But at the same time, in between 1997 and 2002, we did build 225 GW of gas in five years, and so you can solve problems with building quickly.” 

The supply-and-demand picture always is important, but EnCap Investments Managing Partner Kellie Metcalf said that to really roll out the technology, the right market designs are needed. 

“That’s what’s so good about California: The resource adequacy charge is huge,” Metcalf said. “In ERCOT, it’s been the ancillary services and the volatility top to bottom that [cause] revenue.” 

MISO does not have anything like those revenue streams, and other markets like ISO-NE have clean peak programs, but that still is in its early days, she added. 

While MISO is not quite ready to see major investments in batteries because it lacks any real construct that can make storage profitable, Waranch argued that could be solved quickly. “Even if they don’t have a construct yet, when the need arises and they are deficient, they will have to create a construct that works.”