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November 5, 2024

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PacifiCorp Says It Can Meet Oregon GHG Targets

PacifiCorp will be able to meet Oregon’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions-reduction targets for electric utilities, but “it will not be without challenges,” a company official told state regulators Tuesday.

Among those challenges is the sheer growth in PacifiCorp’s projected demand in Oregon, according to Zepure Shahumyan, the utility’s director of energy and environmental policy. The six-state utility expects its Oregon load to increase by 60% by 2030 and 80% by 2040, meaning that growth in absolute emissions will counter progress in reducing per-megawatt-hour emissions.

Shahumyan was among the team of executives on Tuesday presenting PacifiCorp’s integrated resource plan (IRP) and inaugural clean energy plan (CEP) to members of Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, launching the utility’s 2023 IRP process.

PUC Chair Megan Decker noted that it will be the first time the commission will be considering a CEP within an IRP proceeding. CEPs are a new requirement for Oregon utilities, the product of House Bill 2021, which state lawmakers passed two years ago to require electricity providers to reduce their GHG emissions to 80% below a 2010-2012 baseline by 2030, on the path to zero emissions by 2040.

For PacifiCorp, that will mean cutting emissions to 1.8 million metric tons (MMT) of CO2 equivalent by 2030 from a baseline of 8.9 MMT — and from actual current levels of about 11 MMT. HB 2021 also requires the utility to achieve another reduction to 0.9 MMT in 2035 ahead of the 2040 zero-emissions mandate.

Randy Baker, PacifiCorp’s director of resource planning, told the PUC that the 2023 IRP positions the utility to hit those targets. Over the next 20 years, Baker said, PacifiCorp seeks to add 9,111 MW of new wind generation, 8,095 MW of storage resources and 7,855 MW of new solar.

To support that growth in renewables and tap resources located farther inland, the utility also seeks to add more than 1,000 miles of new transmission, including the proposed Boardman-to-Hemingway (B2H) project, to be built in partnership with Idaho Power. Part of the PacifiCorp’s Energy Gateway project designed to increase flows between the company’s eastern and western systems, the 500-kV B2H line would run for 290 miles from the Boardman substation in Eastern Oregon to the Hemingway substation in Idaho, with additional links expected to grow out from both ends, Baker said.

PacifiCorp’s IRP additionally calls for 4,953 MW in capacity savings through energy-efficiency programs and 929 MW saved through demand response.

The PacifiCorp officials presenting Tuesday also acknowledged that meeting the 2040 zero-emission requirement will require adoption of technologies still under development, including 1,500 MW of advanced nuclear generation and 1,240 MW of non-emitting peaking resources. The utility in 2021 agreed to partner with Washington-based TerraPower to build a demonstration Natrium small reactor at the site of a retiring coal plant in Wyoming and last year said it would explore deploying five such plants in its service territory by 2035.

Baker also pointed out that HB 2021 requires that small-scale renewables make up 10% of PacifiCorp’s resource portfolio by 2030. Those resources currently comprise 4.6%, leaving PacifiCorp to procure an additional 490 MW by the target year. He told the commission that PacifiCorp has not received as many bids for small-scale projects as it would have liked, and he encouraged developers “to begin the process to identify interconnection costs for projects” ahead of the opening of a request for proposals in April 2024.

‘Massive Load Increase’

But the prospect of sharp load growth in Oregon will complicate the way PacifiCorp complies with state emissions targets.

Commissioner Mark Thompson noted that the projected 60% jump in demand by 2030 represents “just a massive load increase in a very short time” and asked what the utility could publicly divulge about the nature of the new load.

“I can’t speak much about the load, but I can say it’s a large new commercial load that we are forecasting and as part of the planning horizon and planning assumptions for load on our system and in Oregon specifically,” Shahumyan said.

As a result, she said, PacifiCorp will likely need to bring on even more small-scale renewables — beyond the HB 2021 requirement — to prevent serving that load with other emitting resources in the utility’s six-state system, which also includes portions of California, Idaho, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

PacifiCorp’s efforts will be further complicated by ongoing changes to its resource mix, part of its push to reduce companywide GHG emissions and reach net zero by 2050. While the utility’s IRP calls for retiring much of its coal fleet in the coming years, it plans to convert a handful of coal-fired units to natural gas and operate them until the middle of the next decade. It also plans to upgrade NOx emissions-reduction equipment at its Hunter and Huntington coal plants in Utah and keep those facilities running until 2042.

All those plants will have to play a diminishing role in providing energy to Oregon because, as Shahumyan pointed out, they will continue to contribute to emissions. But those units will still be part of a PacifiCorp system designed to allocate the costs and benefits of all resources across participating states in a process administered by utility regulators.

To overcome the challenges of meeting Oregon’s mandate, PacifiCorp has identified two “pathways,” which Shahumyan said are not mutually exclusive.

The first pathway entails managing how gas-fired resources are dispatched until they are replaced by non-emitting peaking technologies.

“Since adding renewables doesn’t inherently reduce your emissions, you have to back off thermal emission drivers in order for them to impact our goals under HB 2021,” Shahumyan said. “So just flooding the system with renewables by itself won’t do it.”

The second pathway will require PacifiCorp to engage in multistate negotiations with regulators on how to allocate the costs and benefits of its systemwide resources.

“Under this pathway, we’re still allocating our system to Oregon, but we’re limiting thermal resource allocation to Oregon,” Shahumyan said. By doing that, she noted, the utility reaches its 90% emissions reduction target by 2033, seven years ahead of deadline.

During a public comment period after the PacifiCorp presentation, Mike Goetz, general counsel with the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, urged the utility to revise its IRP to replace coal with renewables — not new natural gas units.

“Has PacifiCorp truly put forward a least-cost, least-risk plan to benefit Oregon customers while complying with applicable mandates? Or is it simply planning as a system and then layering on HB 2021 requirements?” Goetz said. “On top of that, if PacifiCorp continues to operate thermal units across its system by converting a number of coal plants to gas, how will the cost of these resources be allocated in future years?”

The Oregon PUC is now taking comment on PacifiCorp’s IRP and CEP and will hold another public meeting on the plans Aug. 10.

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ERCOT Briefs: Week of June 26, 2023

Former EIA Administrator Appointed to Board of Directors

ERCOT said Wednesday that former U.S. Energy Information Administrator Linda Capuano has been appointed to its Board of Directors. Her appointment is effective Saturday.

Capuano fills the independent director’s position left vacant by Zin Smati, who resigned in December over a conflict of interest. (See ERCOT Board Member Resigns over Business Conflict.) She has been a faculty member of Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business since 2015, interrupted by her three-year stint at EIA from 2018 to 2021. Capuano also serves as an adviser to the school’s dean on energy initiatives.

She has also previously served on the boards of CAISO (2007-2010) and Peak Reliability (2013-2018). She has a doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford University and was a fellow in energy technology at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy from 2014 to 2018.

“Linda’s deep energy expertise will be of great value as we continue to strive towards industry-leading reliability and efficient markets,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said in a press release.

Linda Capuano, Rice University | Rice University

Capuano will be joining a board under a new compensation structure approved Thursday by the Texas Public Utility Commission. The action increases the independent directors’ annual compensation from $87,000 to $160,000, an 83.9% increase. It is the first increase since 2011.

The ISO’s eight independent directors are appointed by the state’s three-person ERCOT Board Selection Committee, which comprises appointees from the governor, lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House of Representatives. The directors are required by law to not have fiduciary duty or assets in the ERCOT market and must be Texas residents.

Record Renewables Fill Gap

The Texas grid operator did not see a new high for peak demand Wednesday, but it did set a record for renewable energy production when wind and solar resources produced a combined 31.47 GW of power at 1:20 p.m. CT, according to Grid Status.

“[E]very megawatt helps,” Stoic Energy’s Doug Lewin tweeted, noting that 9.6 GW of thermal plants were offline at the time. ERCOT defines 8.3 GW as “high outages.”

ERCOT set an unofficial peak demand record Tuesday when it averaged 80.83 GW during the hour ending at 6 p.m. That would break the old mark of 80.15 GW set last July, the first time its demand was over 80 GW. (See related story, Under the Dome: ERCOT Sets Peak Demand Marks.)

The grid operator has averaged more than 80 GW during seven interval hours this week.

Gas Plant to Suspend Operations

Talen Energy notified ERCOT on Tuesday that it plans to indefinitely suspend operations at a gas-fired unit near Corpus Christi, Texas.

The company said Barney Davis Unit 1 will stop operating Nov. 24. The 49-year-old unit has a summer seasonal rating of 292 MW.

Also Tuesday, JX Nippon said that its Petra Nova carbon-capture facility near Houston will return to service July 15. It had been scheduled to return to operations Wednesday. The plant has been shut down since 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of slumping oil prices. (See Carbon-capture Plant Coming Back into Service.)

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MISO IMM Zeroes in on Tx Congestion in State of the Market Report

MISO’s Independent Market Monitor debuted five new recommendations this week as part of his annual State of the Market Report, with multiple suggestions aimed at maximizing transmission utilization by clamping down on wind-related congestion.

“This is going to be one of the most central topics. Congestion is the single most significant operating factor we have to manage,” IMM David Patton told the Markets Committee of MISO’s Board of Directors Wednesday in a meeting to detail the 2022 report.

Patton said the footprint experienced a record $3.7 billion in real-time congestion over 2022, with most of that occurring in the Midwest.

He has said wind generation accounts for almost half of MISO’s transmission congestion and that wind resources often aren’t motivated to follow MISO’s dispatch instructions to reel in output to manage transmission constraints.

He suggested MISO ratchet up its excess and deficient energy deployment penalty charges, which he said are currently not high enough to dissuade generators from deviating from MISO’s dispatch instructions.

He said the recommendation stands to address reliability and economic concerns, considering that MISO’s unit dispatch system assumes that generators follow instructions and that flows will match dispatch instructions. He said penalties should be based on generators’ congestion component of their locational marginal pricing.

“Currently, generators do not accrue excess or deficient energy penalties until they exhibit such deviations for four consecutive intervals. Even after this time, the current penalties do not ensure that generators will benefit by following MISO’s dispatch instructions. This is particularly concerning when resources load binding transmission constraints,” Patton wrote, adding that if generators are not inclined to follow dispatch instructions, flows over constraints can “substantially exceed” transmission limits.

“We need our markets to motivate people to follow their dispatch instructions,” Patton previously said at a June 13 Markets Committee meeting. “If this improves dispatch, it would remove a lot of headaches in the control room.”

Patton said MISO has increasingly relied on manual redispatch of resources to manage transmission constraints.

Patton also recommended that MISO expand its transmission constraint demand curves so that its market dispatch system has better control over network flows.

Patton said MISO required “extraordinary operator actions” to manage network flows during storms in 2021 and 2022. He said the current transmission constraint demand curves restrict MISO’s market dispatch from managing transmission congestion because the RTO’s operating reserve demand curve can prevent the dispatch model from reducing output to manage network flows when transmission and capacity emergencies strike MISO simultaneously. Patton said the value the constraint curve places on managing transmission limitations isn’t high enough.

He said MISO operators having to manually dispatch generation to reduce flows on overloaded constraints is “costly and distorts market outcomes.”

Patton also said MISO could improve its near-term wind forecasting to recognize inherent principles of wind generation output. He said currently, MISO uses a “persistence” forecast that assumes wind resources will produce the same amount of output as it most recently observed.

“The downside of this approach is that the forecasted output will be predictably lower when output has been increasing and will be predictably higher when wind output is dropping,” Patton wrote. He said MISO would cut down on forecast errors if its forecasting recognized recent movement in wind output.

LRTP Doubts

Patton’s State of the Market report took an unprecedented foray into transmission planning. He recommended MISO re-examine its future energy mix assumptions behind its ongoing long-range transmission plan (LRTP). Patton said he’s concerned that the second of MISO’s three, 20-year transmission planning futures includes “unrealistically high levels of intermittent resources and unrealistically low levels of dispatchable, hybrid and battery storage resources.”

“The reality is you can’t separate transmission planning and markets. … There’s an interplay between the decisions resource owners are making on the generation side and the decisions MISO is making on the transmission side,” he told MISO board members, who expressed confusion and concern that the IMM would advise MISO on system planning.

Patton said “inefficient investment in transmission” will cause MISO to overlook other solutions to address transmission congestion, including more efficient siting of clean energy resources and investment in new generation, energy storage and grid-enhancing technologies.

MISO is anticipating its members will add 369 GW of mostly wind and solar generation over the next two decades, resulting in a 466-GW system total of nameplate capacity. MISO today operates with about 194 GW. (See MISO Modeling Line Options for 2nd LRTP Portfolio.)

Patton said MISO should reconsider its anticipated fleet evolution in its second future, use the most informed capacity expansion and generation retirement assumptions it can, evaluate energy storage alternatives to new lines, and ensure that “any estimated benefits include all of the costs incurred to realize the benefits.”

He told board members that if MISO assumes members add overwhelmingly intermittent resources, it will conclude reliability will suffer unless it adds dramatically more transmission. Patton said MISO should recognize that members will likely add energy storage components to renewable energy additions and continue to build natural gas facilities.

“I think we need to take a hard look at Future 2 as the basis before we begin this planning,” he said.

Markets Committee members said they must discuss whether it’s appropriate for them to consider MISO transmission planning decisions. The System Planning Committee of the MISO Board of Directors typically oversees MISO’s transmission planning choices.

Annual Offers in the Seasonal Capacity Market

Finally, Patton turned his attention to MISO’s first seasonal capacity auction and said MISO should establish a way for suppliers to submit annual offers and rework some of its 31-day outage limit.

He said an auction that uses only seasonal offer parameters “raises substantial challenges for participants that have annual going forward costs they must cover.”

“Suppliers with a resource that requires a capital investment to remain in operation would find it difficult to offer such costs since it will not know how many seasons in which the resource will clear,” he explained.

Patton also said MISO’s 31-day limit on non-exempt generation outages is causing some distortion in the capacity market because “a number of suppliers” this year deliberately adjusted their longer unit outages, so they straddled seasons, thereby dodging penalties.

“This can be problematic for outages that are shifted from shoulder seasons into higher-demand winter and summer seasons,” Patton said. He said MISO should figure out how it can motivate better outage scheduling.

MISO leadership will respond to Patton’s State of the Market report in December.

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MISO Stakeholders Request JTIQ Cost Containment Measures

Stakeholders pressed MISO to include some form of cost containment measures for it and SPP’s Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue portfolio, weeks after the RTOs revealed that the cost estimate for the projects nearly doubled to about $2 billion.

The requests came at a June 27 special meeting to firm up the tariff additions MISO will need to incorporate in the JTIQ study and cost recovery details so it can become a repeatable process.

Stakeholders asked MISO to include some oversight or protections against cost overruns on the transmission projects in its tariff edits. MISO staff said while they’ve discussed the possibility, at this point they will likely only consider cost protections for future JTIQ portfolios. However, their position became more fluid as the meeting wore on.

MISO and SPP this month announced the costs estimate for the first, five-project JTIQ portfolio of 345 kV lines rose from a little more than $1 billion to nearly $1.9 billion. The larger figure was sent to the Department of Energy under a funding application for the agency’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program. (See JTIQ Portfolio Cost Estimate Nearly Doubles to $1.9B.)

MISO staff said for the DOE application, transmission owners included recent inflation and supply chain trends and tried to predict sharper routing and regulatory issues for their projects, raising costs. MISO and SPP have also included administration costs not included in the original JTIQ estimate, including FERC filing costs and costs related to the DOE funding application and federal environmental reviews.

Invenergy’s Sophia Dossin said a cap on project costs is important, considering JTIQ cost estimates have almost doubled in two years.

“Even just having a percentage somewhere, even a very high cap that we’re sure we’re never going to hit at least gives generators some sort of certainty,” Dossin said.

Clean Grid Alliance’s Rhonda Peters said some type of oversight on costs is “critical.” She warned that some generation developers might not go through with projects based on the risks of escalating line costs.

“If that dollar-per-megawatt charge is high right off the bat, this is not going to work. If those costs are in the mid-range and then double, then projects that invested significant capital will not be able to go forward,” she said, asking for “some sort of accountability mechanism.”

Some stakeholders said the grid operators and transmission owners might be underestimating the effect that stubbornly high inflation will have on the cost of projects.

MISO staff said the JTIQ portfolio can enable an estimated 28 GW of new installed capacity and should give large groups of interconnection customers lowered transmission upgrade costs and more cost certainty than under its previous affected system studies process.

MISO so far has not shared an estimated range of dollar-per-megawatt charges that individual generation projects might face.

“All the buzz around cost caps, is that going to be considered in the tariff language development? … What’s the upper limit where generation developers will not subscribe to these lines?” Southern Renewable Energy Association’s Andy Kowalczyk said.

“I wouldn’t say anything is off the table. We’re listening very carefully to your concerns, and we’re going to discuss them internally,” MISO counsel Chris Supino said. “If there’s a way to include these without disturbing what we’re working towards in the tariff, we’re going to consider them.”

Kowalczyk said contemplating “an upper limit where people are going to bail on lines” is important because load will temporarily pick up the tab on the first JTIQ portfolio if the first batch of lines don’t have enough subscribers to be fully funded.

The JTIQ study is designed to focus on backbone projects rather than point-of-interconnection network upgrades. Whereas MISO’s and SPP’s previous process used actual generation sites in interconnection queues in affected system studies, the JTIQ leans on the likely interconnection spots of future generation representing multiple queue study clusters from both RTOs.

Until now, MISO and SPP have used affected system studies to identify additional, across-the-seam network upgrades the other might need as a result of new generation connecting close to the seam. And while MISO and SPP until now have identified only network upgrades for a particular SPP or MISO study cycle, the JTIQ study is designed to identify larger and longer-term system needs across seams and across groups of generation projects under study.

At this point, MISO considers its proposal to split JTIQ costs 90% to interconnecting generators with the remaining 10% assigned to load final. It will include that cost allocation in tariff edits.

“There is some disagreement, but we believe this course is settled: JTIQ projects meet the definition of generator interconnection projects,” Supino said.

Supino said MISO and SPP are discussing whether the projects should be a subcategory of interconnection upgrades, but he said it’s undisputed that the JTIQ projects are replacing MISO and SPP’s affected system study process and should be allocated 90% to interconnecting generation and 10% to load. As such, he said JTIQ projects won’t be open to competitive bidding.

Supino said MISO will include a pledge in its transmittal letter to FERC to evaluate cost allocation changes in future JTIQ portfolios. MISO didn’t elaborate on which additional benefits it might consider allocating in the future.

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Solar Property Tax Fix Sent to Whitmer

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan lawmakers on Wednesday approved legislation to circumvent tax assessment fights over utility-scale solar projects, allowing municipalities to charge a flat $7,000/MW annual fee. The Senate overwhelmingly approved HB 4317 and HB 4318 by a 27-10 vote, sending them on to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

The two bills — which create a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILT) structure for new solar projects — passed the Michigan House last week.

The bills allow local governments to create solar energy districts in which solar facilities of 2 MW or more would be exempt from property taxes for 20 years in return for the $7,000/MW annual payment.

“The property tax valuation of these facilities has been inconsistent and contentious, at times resulting in litigation between local governments and facility owners,” a legislative analysis of the bills explained. “Some people believe that this litigation burdens local governments and delays the buildout of renewable energy in the state.”

Supporters of the bills said standardizing the tax valuation of solar facilities would avoid such controversies.

Rep. Curtis VanderWall (R), sponsor of HB 4317, told the Senate Energy and Environment Committee on Tuesday the bills resulted from two years of efforts involving local governments, utilities, renewable energy advocates and the Department of Treasury. Whitmer had vetoed similar bills in 2020, saying at the time the Legislature had acted without considering proposals on the issue from the state’s Tax Commission.

The bills will encourage solar development because participating governments will have guaranteed revenue, VanderWall said.

Ed Rivet, of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, said the measures could help solar projects avoid some of the problems local governments have had in considering wind projects.

Brian Vanblarcum, director of tax for CMS Energy, told the committee the legislation could end “degrading” controversies between local governments and utilities on developing renewable energy projects.

Local government groups were neutral on the package, however. Judy Allen, with the Michigan Townships Association, said while the package was a big improvement over the 2020 proposals — especially by giving local governments the option to participate in the plan, unlike the 2020 bills, which made participation mandatory — it did not include some provisions those governments wanted, such as indexing the PILT payment amount to the Consumer Price Index.

Laura Sherman, of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council, said the bills will support local governments and help renewable energy employment in Michigan. “This legislation can help us further grow our economy while ensuring that communities benefit from increased tax revenues,” she said.

EV Chargers Excluded from ‘Utility’ Definition

Also Wednesday, the Michigan House approved HB 4706, allowing electric vehicle charging station operators to re-sell electricity to EV owners without having to register as utilities.

The bill codifies the state Public Service Commission’s policy exempting EV chargers.

The bill, which passed the House on a 100-8 vote, now goes to the Senate, where passage is expected, as the measure is part of a package of legislation to boost Michigan’s net zero efforts.

Environmental groups, Tesla and General Motors all supported the bill.

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EPA Launches $7B Solar for All Program

The Biden administration’s goal for decarbonizing the power sector by 2035 got a boost Wednesday with EPA’s launch of a $7 billion grant competition to expand residential solar in low-income communities.

“The new grant competition will provide funds to expand existing low-income solar programs as well as develop and implement new Solar for All programs nationwide,” EPA announced. “Solar for All programs ensure low-income households have equitable access to residential rooftop and residential community solar power.”

The funding comes from the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion green bank, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The program will award up to 60 grants to states, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and eligible nonprofits for creating or expanding residential solar to low-income and disadvantaged communities. EPA said it will guarantee that participating households save a minimum of 20% on their total electricity bills.

“For too long, overburdened communities on the front lines of the climate crisis have been left behind and locked out of clean energy investments and climate solutions,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said. “This historic boost in solar investments will advance millions of residential solar projects nationwide, protect people and the planet, deliver environmental justice, save families money and create good-paying jobs.”

The deadline to apply is Sept. 26. Grants will be provided in three tiers, “calibrated to the number of households the applicant intends the program to serve,” EPA said: $25 million to $100 million; $100 million to $250 million; and $250 million to $400 million.

Regan announced the launch in Vermont, alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders. The announcement coincided with a webinar produced by D.C.-based OurEnergyPolicy examining the problems that have slowed or stymied the administration’s growth targets for solar.

Noting that to meet the administration’s objective, the industry will have to triple annual deployment in the next few years, David Murray, director of solar policy at the American Clean Power Association, asked panelists to describe the reforms that will be needed.

Ed Scarborough, vice president of development at Distributed Sun, said permitting needs to be streamlined and standardized across the country.

“The backlog of transmission interconnection applications has become a major roadblock for new projects, in part because utilities and transmission line operators are also upgrading the grid,” Scarborough said. “The queues also are very crowded right now, and there’s just a tremendous number of projects in the queues, many of which will never actually be implemented. We need to see some work to clean up those queues so that the viable projects can get through the process much faster.”

Meghan Nutting, vice president of government and regulatory affairs at Sunnova Energy, said permitting rules vary by state and sometimes even within a state. She said Congress should end that.

“There are a couple of things Congress can do … all the way down to the state and very local level. One of the big things for distributed systems, sort of similar to large-scale systems, is permitting. Permitting is inconsistent across states; across even individual [localities] having jurisdiction within an individual state,” she said.

A battle between Congress and the administration over tariffs on imported solar panels has pumped up uncertainty. At this point, most solar panels are still imported, Murray said.

Garrett Nilsen, deputy director of the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, agreed but said the situation will improve.

“The Inflation Reduction Act does give us a line of sight to seeing manufacturing … be repatriated to the United States, and we’ve seen dozens of manufacturing announcements representing over 100 GW of manufacturing capacity across the entire supply chain,” Nilsen said. “And of course, it’s going to take a little bit of time for these capacities to come online as people need to site their facilities and start to just start to build things out. But we’re working closely with the manufacturers, with the National Renewable Energy Lab and [with] others to help support those who want to manufacture in the United States.”

EPA solar

Clockwise from top left: David Murray, American Clean Power Association; Meghan Nutting, Sunnova; Garrett Nilsen, DOE Solar Energy Technologies Office, and Ed Scarborough, Distributed Sun. | OurEnergyPolicy

“The problem is a stop-start reaction to this continuing back-and-forth on tariffs for foreign goods,” Scarborough responded. “Developers need certainty going forward in their supply chain. And I would say it’s more than just the panels; it’s the inverters. It’s all the other things and … adding batteries.”

“Now, we are concerned about battery supplies and even the underlying minerals, [and] the amount of connectivity done to supply those going forward. Part of what we need is some type of roadmap on the availability of all the components of the supply chain, the rules and regulations around them, and trying to [get free from] this reactionary approach that we’ve been subjected to over the last couple of years,” he said.

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California Study to Delve into EV Charging Challenges

Electric vehicle drivers encounter a wide range of issues when they visit public charging stations, and researchers from the University of California, Davis, plan to delve into the causes of charging failure through a three-year study of thousands of chargers.

The California Energy Commission this month approved a $953,168 contract with UC Davis to conduct the study.

Researchers will test 3,600 or more public EV chargers across California, including in rural and urban areas and low-income and disadvantaged communities. They will create a standardized charger-testing procedure that can be used in future studies and will make comparing data from different studies easier.

Dustin Schell, an air resources engineer at CEC, called the study “the largest single attempt to understand the reliability of the public charging network that CEC staff are aware of.”

“This agreement will help fill a major gap in our understanding of the actual reliability of EV chargers operating in California,” Schell said during a commission meeting.

CEC has been supporting the state’s transition to electric vehicles through funding EV charging infrastructure projects.

CEC Chair David Hochschild said the study is “an incredibly important step.”

“Charger reliability is fundamental to our strategy, and I think even the perception of not having a reliable network itself is very damaging,” Hochschild said.

‘Uptime’ Debated

Schell said charger reliability is often gauged by “uptime,” which is generally considered to be the percentage of time the charger is operational and available to deliver electricity upon customer request.

But uptime is only one piece of the puzzle.

“A large number of documented failures-to-charge occur when the charger is in an apparent operational state,” Schell said.

Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, said EV charging companies receive a digital signal from their public chargers indicating the unit is operational. The companies use that data in reporting their charger uptime.

But an EV driver might not be able to charge due to a variety of reasons, said Tal, who is leading the CEC-funded study. The charger could be blocked by another vehicle or, as was the case along mountain roads last winter, by a pile of snow.

The connector might be dented because someone ran over it, Tal said. Or troubles with the payment system may stop a driver from charging.

“The story is much more complicated than just on and off,” Tal told NetZero Insider.

The study will assess the ability to charge a variety of EVs at different charging stations. The focus will be on DC fast chargers. Students at UC campuses across the state will be trained to test the chargers.

The charging of Tesla vehicles at Tesla stations also will be evaluated. And Tal said he hopes to be able to test charging of non-Tesla EVs at Tesla charging stations. Tesla announced in February that it would make at least 7,500 chargers in its network available for non-Tesla EVs by the end of 2024.

UC Davis will provide interim reports to the CEC each year as well as a final report. Based on their findings, researchers will recommend ways that charging providers can improve the reliability of public chargers.

Bay Area EV Charging Studied

The UC Davis study follows a report on EV charging reliability from UC Berkeley researchers last year.

The study, headed by David Rempel, looked at 657 chargers at 181 charging stations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and found 22.7% were non-functioning. Reasons included unresponsive screens, failure to start charging, payment system issues, network failures or broken connectors.

In another 4.9% of chargers, the cable was too short to reach the inlet on the EV.

The researchers said their findings “appear to conflict” with the 95% to 98% uptime reported by charging station operators.

Tal at UC Davis called the earlier study “really important.”

“Now we need to go to the next level and do it in a more rigorous way,” he said.

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White House Sets 2025 Cybersecurity Priorities

Cybersecurity will remain a high priority for the White House in the near future, particularly at critical U.S. infrastructure facilities, according to a memorandum issued to heads of executive departments and agencies by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday.

The memo is intended to guide agency heads planning cybersecurity investments as they create their fiscal 2025 budget submissions. In it, OMB Director Shalanda Young and acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden identified five priority areas, consistent with the five pillars of the National Cybersecurity Strategy the White House issued in March. (See “Zero-trust, Cybersecurity’s New Focus,” Texas RE Board/MRC Briefs: May 17, 2023.)

OMB and the Office of the Cyber Director (ONCD) plan to review the agencies’ budget submissions for gaps in addressing these priorities and provide potential solutions, in addition to suggestions for the agencies’ future-year budget planning. A separate memo will address cybersecurity research and development priorities.

Public-Private Collaboration Emphasized

Defending critical infrastructure against cyberattacks is the first priority identified by OMB and ONCD. This section includes guidance related to strengthening and modernizing federal defenses, enhancing the security stance of private-sector infrastructure operators, and improving “baseline cybersecurity requirements” by ensuring that “the most capable and best-positioned actors in cyberspace serve as effective stewards of the cyber ecosystem.”

As part of the latter guidance, federal regulators are “strongly encouraged to consult with regulated entities” about the most effective cybersecurity requirements and resources to accomplish security goals. The budget submissions should ensure that requirements use current cybersecurity frameworks and consensus standards whenever possible and that baseline cyber standards are flexible enough to be applied across infrastructure sectors and adapt to malicious actors’ changing tactics and capabilities.

Scaling public-private collaboration is another component of this initial section, with emphasis on the role of sector risk management agencies (SRMA) in leading the response across various sectors. SRMAs were established in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to support sector risk management, assess sector risk, manage sector coordination, facilitate information sharing, support incident management and contribute to emergency preparedness efforts. The Department of Energy is the SRMA for the electricity sector.

The memo tasks SRMAs with developing plans to “mature [their] capabilities” and improve their processes for collaborating with critical infrastructure owners and operators on risk identification and mitigation. The organizations are also asked to consider their capacity for adding specialized cyber analysts to evaluate sector needs and improve government processes for intelligence and information analysis.

Cybercrime

Other priorities identified in the memo include countering cybercrime and ransomware actors by organizing staff to investigate and disrupt criminal activity before it affects critical infrastructure, as in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack of 2021. (See Colonial CEO Welcomes Federal Cyber Assistance.) Agency heads are encouraged to ensure their organizations participate in interagency cybercrime task forces.

The memo’s third priority asks agency heads to show their ability to ensure accountability and security through the procurement process. Priority four urges agencies and departments to highlight their planned cyber workforce investments, considering the ongoing challenges in both the public and private sectors with “recruiting, hiring and retaining [cybersecurity] professionals.”

The fourth priority also requests information on organizations’ preparations for the coming generation of quantum computing devices, which are expected to pose significant threats to existing data encryption practices.

Finally, agencies whose mandates include overseas cybersecurity activities should explain how they work with foreign partners to prepare for cyberattacks, including strengthening public- and private-sector capabilities, and to ensure global supply chains for information, communication, and operational technology products and services remain secure.

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Constellation Gives Details on First-in-nation Pink Hydrogen Production

Constellation Energy on Wednesday gave an update on the hydrogen production demonstration project at one of its nuclear plants in New York.

The first-in-the-nation production of “pink” hydrogen — generated through electrolysis powered by nuclear energy — began March 7 and is generating data about producing the cleaner-burning gas without generating emissions along the way.

The Nine Mile Point hydrogen project can generate up to 531 kg of hydrogen per day with a 1.5-MW draw: 1.25 MW for the electrolyzer, and 250 kW for its associated equipment.

The two nuclear reactors on site consume only about 80 kg in operation. What to do with the remaining capacity is the subject of a separate demonstration project backed by New York state that is expected to go online in 2025 and explore the potential of hydrogen fuel cells as a long-duration energy storage mechanism.

The electrolyzer project is scheduled to end Oct. 1, four years after it gained conditional approval. Constellation is looking at scaling up operations with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to demonstrate how electrolyzers might participate in power markets.

Constellation’s Bob Beaumont, who managed the installation of the electrolyzer and associated equipment at Nine Mile Point, gave an update Wednesday in a DOE webinar:

    • Planning the project was a bowl of alphabet soup: NERC, NYISO, EPA, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and New York Department of Environmental Conservation regulations all had bearing on what was built.
    • The project is running just shy of its $14.4 million budget.
    • Weekly operations checks take four to five worker hours; quarterly maintenance about 20 worker hours; and annual maintenance about 20 worker hours.
    • A quarter mile of cable was needed to power the electrolyzer, and it had to be buried several feet deep because of severe winters.
    • The extreme cold — as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit — caused valves to begin to leak and revealed a need for special sealing materials.
    • The potential blast radii of the electrolyzer and the hydrogen storage tank in the event of a lightning strike or terrorist attack had to be evaluated because of the proximity of the two reactors; the system was placed out of the security zone and away from the safety systems. Also, the amount of hydrogen being stored on-site did not change, so a modification of NRC permits was not needed.
    • The system was designed to automatically shut down and vent itself if it is hit by seiche waves off Lake Ontario during a storm or after an earthquake.
    • The process draws about 2 gallons of water per minute from the local municipal water system, runs it through consumer-grade softeners and carbon filters; and passes it through a reverse osmosis filter and a set of resin filters to reduce its conductivity to the right level; too much conductivity leaves impurities on the membranes, too little thwarts the electrolyzer.

Future Fuel

Hydrogen, which burns without producing greenhouse gas emissions, is potentially a key tool in fighting climate change. It could serve as a form of energy storage and is viewed as an alternative power source for industries and applications that otherwise would be hard to decarbonize.

But the cost of production currently is a barrier to wider use. DOE made reducing that cost by 80%, to $1/kg, the central goal of the first of its Energy Earthshots in 2021.

Interest is keen in green hydrogen — derived from renewable resources — because producing greenhouse emissions to generate hydrogen limits the net benefit of burning that hydrogen instead of fossil fuel.

Pink hydrogen is produced with emissions-free nuclear power and, in some processes, with the excess heat generated by nuclear fission.

Beyond hydrogen’s potential role in the clean energy transition, operators of boiling-water reactors such as the two at Nine Mile Point use it steadily to prevent corrosion inside the reactors and as a coolant for the rotors on the generators.

Constellation partnered on the Nine Mile Point demonstration project with Nel Hydrogen, manufacturer of the electrolyzer membranes, and the National Renewable Energy, Argonne and Idaho national laboratories.

DOE hydrogen demonstration projects are underway at three other nuclear power stations nationwide.

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California Duck Curve Getting Deeper

Increasing solar capacity in California pushed the belly of the state’s “duck curve” to new lows this spring, putting stress on the grid and challenging CAISO operators, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a post last week.

Charting the state’s net load — the demand that remains after wind and solar are subtracted — produces the duck curve. Its neck and tail represent times in the morning and evening when demand rises but solar is weak or offline. Its belly represents the middle of the day when abundant solar steeply reduces net load.

From March to May, net load hovered around zero between noon and 2 p.m. and briefly dipped into negative territory, according to an EIA chart based on CAISO data. That first happened in spring 2022, but the chart shows it occurring more this year. (See CAISO’s New Renewables Record Falls Hair Short of 100%.)

The deepening duck belly has drawbacks and benefits, EIA said.

“As more solar capacity comes online, conventional power plants are used less often during the middle of the day,” it said.

CAISO statistics show that solar power peaked on May 23 at more than 15,000 MW, exceeding a 14,000-MW peak in May 2022. (The ISO later saw a new record for solar production of 15,718 MW on June 13.)

That can stress the grid and upend traditional economics, EIA noted.

“The extreme swing in demand for electricity from conventional power plants from midday to late evenings, when energy demand is still high but solar generation has dropped off, means that conventional power plants, such as natural gas-fired plants, must quickly ramp up electricity production to meet consumer demand,” it said.

“That rapid ramp up makes it more difficult for grid operators to match grid supply (the power they are generating) with grid demand in real time,” EIA said. “In addition, if more solar power is produced than the grid can use, operators might have to curtail solar power to prevent overgeneration.”

In addition, the “dynamics of the duck curve can challenge the traditional economics of dispatchable power plants because the factors contributing to the curve reduce the amount of time a conventional power plant operates, which results in reduced energy revenues,” EIA said.

The upside is that the duck curve has “created opportunities for energy storage,” EIA said. “The large-scale deployment of energy storage systems, such as batteries, allow some solar energy generated during the day to be stored and saved for later, after the sun sets. Storing some midday solar generation flattens the duck’s curve, and dispatching the stored solar generation in the evening shortens the duck’s neck.”

California has been rapidly adding battery storage to the grid in recent years in response to evening shortfalls.

Battery storage in CAISO has grown from 0.2 GW in 2018 to 4.9 GW in April 2023, and operators plan to add another 4.5 GW in-state by the end of the year, EIA said.

California’s experience with the duck curve has been spreading to other areas, including New England, it noted. (See New England’s Duck Curve Days Chart Solar Growth.)

“In addition, a duck curve is becoming visible at the national level in the United States,” EIA said.