Snohomish County PUD Partners With the City of Everett, WA on New Solar Project
April 27, 2022
by Vanessa Nikolic
APPA News
April 27, 2022
Washington State’s Snohomish County Public Utility District (PUD) and City of Everett are partnering on a solar project that will generate funds and assist PUD customers with paying their bills.
The solar project will be built in south Everett and will direct solar generation benefits to Project Providing Relief for Individuals Dependent on Energy (PRIDE), the PUD’s customer-funded income-qualified program that currently serves 500 customers annually.
Established in 1982, Project PRIDE is primarily funded by contributions from PUD customers. Funds are used to provide one-time grants for families and individuals who need help paying their energy bills.
In place of selling energy units to customers, Snohomish PUD will donate funds created by the new solar project to its Project PRIDE program. The program will receive an estimated additional $27,600 in annual energy credits through the community solar project.
The PUD was awarded a grant of $861,814 through the Washington Clean Energy Fund (CEF) 3 Low-Income Community Solar Deployment Program to help pay for the project. The CEF is managed by the Washington State Department of Commerce, which supports the development and deployment of clean energy technology.
The planned solar array will have a capacity of 375 kilowatts, generating enough electricity to power approximately 40 homes.
The estimated cost to build the array is around $1.5 million. Construction is scheduled to start later this year.
For more information on the project, visit the PUD’s website.
New York Regulators Approve Renewable Energy Contracts
April 26, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
April 26, 2022
The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) recently approved contracts with Clean Path New York LLC for its Clean Path NY project and H.Q. Energy Services Inc. for its Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) project to deliver solar, wind and hydroelectric power from upstate New York and Canada to New York City.
Clean Path NY comprises a 175-mile state-of-the-art transmission line, 3,800 megawatts of new in-state solar and wind power, and New York Power Authority’s (NYPA) existing Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Power Plant, a hydroelectric facility that will strengthen the reliability and resiliency of the project.
“Together, these assets will dramatically increase the delivery of reliable, cost-effective renewable energy into New York City to drive a significant reduction in the use of fossil fuel plants that are currently relied upon to serve the city’s peak energy needs,” NYPA noted.
The project is a partnership between Invenergy, energyRe and NYPA.
The CHPE project involves the construction of an underground and underwater transmission line spanning approximately 339 miles between the Canada–U.S. border and New York City and is being developed by Transmission Developers, Inc. and Hydro-Québec.
The PSC’s April 14 decision was bolstered by the City of New York’s confirmation that it will join in these landmark awards by agreeing to purchase a portion of the renewable attributes generated by the two projects, thus helping to make the scale of these projects possible while creating the opportunity to reduce the cost impact of these projects by up to $1.7 billion to all other ratepayers.
The New York State Office of General Services has also committed to entering into a contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) for Tier 4 renewable energy credits (RECs) associated with the energy used by State agencies and departments located in the city.
NYSERDA will also offer renewable attributes from these projects for voluntary purchase.
With approval of the contracts, NYSERDA payments will commence for each respective project once the project has obtained all required permits and approvals, has completed construction, and is delivering power to New York City, which is expected to begin in 2025 for the fully permitted CHPE project and 2027 for the Clean Path NY project.
Iowa’s Denison Municipal Utilities Recognized For Safety Efforts by State House of Representatives
April 26, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
April 26, 2022
Iowa public power utility Denison Municipal Utilities recently received a certificate of recognition from the Iowa House of Representatives after receiving a Safety Award of Excellence from the American Public Power Association (APPA).
The April 7 certificate of recognition said that Iowa Rep. Steven Holt noted that Denison Municipal Utilities deserves recognition for receiving first place in the Group C division for APPA’s Safety Award of Excellence.
“Any work injuries and illnesses can affect every aspect of life for our employees and their families,” said Rory Weis, General Manager for Denison Municipal Utilities.
“We appreciate the fact that all of our employees are safety conscious in the day-to-day activities as we provide essential services to the community,” he said.
APPA in late March 2022 said that 138 utilities earned the Safety Award of Excellence for safe operating practices in 2021.
There were 318 utilities from across the country that submitted applications for the annual Safety Awards. Entrants were placed in categories according to their number of worker-hours and ranked based on the most incident-free records during 2021.
A utility’s incidence rate, used to judge entries, is based on its number of work-related reportable injuries or illnesses and the number of worker-hours during 2021, as defined by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
DOE Announces Up To $1.6 Million In Grants For Nuclear Education
April 26, 2022
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
April 26, 2022
The Department of Energy (DOE) late last week announced plans to award up to $1.6 million over three years for programs that provide local communities with educational resources regarding the benefits of nuclear power.
The Funding Opportunity Announcement would provide up to 11 awards that would develop partnerships between the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy and various communities.
The partnerships would work with educational entities and other constituencies to accomplish a “shared mission of utilizing nuclear energy to advance energy, environmental, and economic initiatives” with an emphasis on environmental justice.
The Biden administration has requested approximately $480,000.00 in fiscal year 2022 to fund the program. The awards are contingent upon the availability of funds appropriated by Congress.
“To implement the nuclear technologies of the future we need to communicate the benefits to every community, integrate energy justice into everything we do, and build the next generation of nuclear leaders,” Andrew Griffith acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said in a statement.
The DOE identified four areas of focus for the grants:
- The development of resources and educational materials for the community and local government officials;
- The creation of partnerships with organizations and communities at the frontlines of the energy transition who are impacted by and/or interested in nuclear energy and its fuel cycle;
- The development of materials for educators to help students understand the basics of nuclear science and encourage careers in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields; and
- The funding of fellowships for international students to study nuclear engineering at American universities, national labs, and with industry partners.
The Biden administration has identified the current fleet of 93 reactors as a vital resource to achieve net-zero emissions economy wide by 2050. Nuclear power currently provides 52 percent of the nation’s carbon-free electricity.
Grant applications are available at Grants.gov and must be received to the DOE by July 20, 2022.
Pacific Northwest Lab Scientists Develop Prototype ‘Seasonal’ Battery
April 26, 2022
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
April 26, 2022
Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say they have developed a “freeze-thaw” battery that could potentially provide long-term “seasonal” energy storage.
The prototype battery, about the size of a hockey puck, uses molten salt technology to trap and store energy.
The work by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) scientists was published online March 23 in Cell Reports Physical Science.
“Longer-duration energy storage technologies are important for increasing the resilience of the grid when incorporating a large amount of renewable energy,” Imre Gyuk, director of energy storage at the Department of Energy Office of Electricity, said in a statement. “This research marks an important step toward a seasonal battery storage solution that overcomes the self-discharge limitations of today’s battery technologies.”
A seasonal battery could be used to capture the hydroelectric energy of spring water runoff and store it for use when summer electricity demand is high, or it could be used to enhance a utility’s ability to weather a power outage, the PNNL scientists said.
“It’s a lot like growing food in your garden in the spring, putting the extra in a container in your freezer, and then thawing it out for dinner in the winter,” Minyuan “Miller” Li, a postdoctoral researcher at PNNL and first author of the report, said in a statement.
The freeze-thaw battery is charged by heating it to 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing ions to flow through the liquid electrolyte to create chemical energy, and then colling the battery to room temperature, which causes the electrolyte to solidify. When the energy is needed, the battery is reheated and the energy flows.
The battery’s electrolyte is molten salt, which is liquid at higher temperatures but solid at room temperature. In tests, the PNNL freeze-thaw battery has retained 92 percent of its capacity over 12 weeks.
The prototype battery was designed to avoid the use of rate and highly reactive materials and, instead, uses an anode and cathode that are aluminum and nickel, respectively, in a molten salt electrolyte with the addition of sulfur to enhance the battery’s energy capacity. And the separator between the anode and the cathode is made of fiberglass instead of ceramic, which can be susceptible to breakage during the freeze-thaw cycle.
The prototype battery’s energy is stored at a materials cost of about $23 per kilowatt hour (kWh), which was measured before a recent jump in the cost of nickel, PNNL said.
The PNNL team said it is exploring the use of iron, which is less expensive, in hopes of bringing the materials cost down to around $6 per kWh, roughly 15 times less than the materials cost of today’s lithium-ion batteries.
The prototype battery’s theoretical energy density is 260 watt-hours per kilogram, which is higher than current lead-acid and flow batteries.
Vermont Senate Passes Budget That Provides AMI Funding For Public Power
April 26, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
April 26, 2022
The Vermont Senate recently approved an $8 billion budget that includes a significant investment for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in the state’s public power communities. The budget passed the Senate on April 20, 2022.
In March, House lawmakers recognized a need for AMI funding for public power and cooperative electric utilities. The House passed its version of the budget bill with $5 million in one-time funding from the General Fund appropriated to AMI.
The Senate Appropriations Committee then provided unanimous support for an additional $3 million in funding, for a total $8 million “towards the affordable, equitable implementation of AMI in Vermont’s rural communities,” the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority (VPPSA) noted.
The $8 million of AMI funding will be administered by the Vermont Department of Public Service. It will be applied as a reimbursement to public power and cooperative electric utilities that implement AMI systems that have been approved by the Vermont Public Utilities Commission.
The bill will now likely head to a conference committee consisting of House and Senate negotiators. Action on the budget will be taken by Vermont Governor Phil Scott later this spring.
VPPSA provides municipal electric utility members with a broad spectrum of services and solutions, including regulatory assistance, financial planning, and power supply.
VPPSA members include Barton Village, Village of Enosburg Falls, Hardwick Electric Department, Village of Jacksonville Electric Company, Village of Johnson Electric Department, Ludlow Electric Light Department, Lyndonville Electric Department, Morrisville Water & Light Department, Town of Northfield Electric Department, Village of Orleans, and Swanton Village Electric Department.
FERC Issues Proposal To Reform Regional Grid Planning, Cost Allocation Requirements
April 25, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
April 25, 2022
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on April 21 issued Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) to reform the Commission’s electric regional transmission planning and cost allocation requirements.
The proposed reforms are intended to remedy deficiencies in the Commission’s existing regional transmission planning and cost allocation requirements to ensure that Commission-jurisdictional rates remain just and reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential, FERC staff noted in a presentation given at the Commission’s monthly open meeting (Docket No. RM21-17).
The NOPR, which was issued pursuant to Section 206 of the Federal Power Act, builds on FERC Order Nos. 888, 890, and 1000, in which the Commission incrementally developed the requirements that govern regional transmission planning and cost allocation processes to ensure that Commission-jurisdictional rates remain just and reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential.
Of particular note to public power utilities, the NOPR seeks to promote joint ownership of transmission facilities by proposing to modify FERC Order No. 1000 to permit incumbent transmission owners to exercise a federal right of first refusal for transmission facilities selected in a regional transmission plan for purposes of cost allocation, conditioned on the incumbent transmission provider establishing joint ownership of those facilities.
In late 2021, the American Public Power Association (APPA) urged the Commission to promote joint transmission ownership through the transmission planning process. APPA’s comments came in response to an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANOPR) issued by FERC in July 2021 to reform its transmission planning, cost allocation, and generator interconnection rules.
Regional Transmission Planning
With respect to regional transmission planning, the reforms proposed in the NOPR would require transmission providers to conduct long-term regional transmission planning on a sufficiently forward-looking basis to meet transmission needs driven by changes in the resource mix and demand.
As part of this long-term regional transmission planning, transmission providers would be required to: (1) identify transmission needs driven by changes in the resource mix and demand through the development of long-term scenarios, including accounting for high-impact, low-frequency events such as extreme weather; (2) evaluate the benefits of regional transmission facilities to meet these needs over a time horizon that covers, at a minimum 20 years starting from the estimated in-service date of the transmission facilities; and, (3) establish transparent and not unduly discriminatory criteria to select transmission facilities in the regional transmission plan for purposes of cost allocation that more efficiently or cost-effectively address these transmission needs.
Additionally, the NOPR proposes to require that transmission providers more fully consider dynamic line ratings and advanced power flow control devices in regional transmission planning.
Cost Allocation
With respect to transmission cost allocation, the reforms proposed in the NOPR would require that transmission providers in each transmission planning region seek to obtain the agreement of relevant state entities within the transmission planning region regarding the cost allocation method or methods that will apply to transmission facilities selected in the regional transmission plan for purposes of cost allocation through long-term regional transmission planning and revise their OATTs to include those methods.
The NOPR also proposes to not permit transmission providers to take advantage of the Commission’s construction-work-in-progress (CWIP) rate incentive for transmission facilities selected in the regional plan for purposes of cost allocation through long-term regional transmission planning.
With respect to federal rights of first refusal, the NOPR proposes to amend Order No. 1000’s requirements, in part, to permit the exercise of federal rights of first refusal for transmission facilities selected in a regional transmission plan for purposes of cost allocation, conditioned on the incumbent transmission provider establishing joint ownership of the transmission facilities.
With respect to transparency and coordination, the NOPR proposes to require transmission providers to adopt enhanced transparency requirements for local transmission planning processes and improve coordination between regional and local transmission planning with the aim of identifying potential opportunities to “right-size” replacement transmission facilities.
With respect to interregional transmission coordination and cost allocation, the reforms proposed in the NOPR would require that transmission providers revise their existing interregional transmission coordination procedures to reflect the long-term regional transmission planning reforms proposed in the NOPR.
The proposed reforms in the NOPR related to regional transmission planning and cost allocation requirements, are focused on the transmission planning process, and not on any substantive outcomes that may result from this process.
The NOPR seeks comment on the proposed reforms and encourages commenters to identify enhancements to those reforms that could better support development of more efficient or cost-effective transmission facilities.
Comments on the NOPR are due 75 days from the date of publication in the Federal Register, with reply comments due 30 days after the initial comment deadline.
Commissioners Weigh In
“Transmission facilities provide a broad range of benefits,” FERC Chairman Rich Glick said. “Planning for those facilities with a longer-term forward-looking approach, in addition to fairly allocating their costs, is essential to ensuring we are developing energy infrastructure in a manner that reduces costs and enhances reliability.”
FERC Commissioner Allison Clements said in her opening statement at the meeting that the NOPR “is not a plan to foist the costs of one state’s policies onto another. It is also not a policy action to advance renewable energy interests.”
The NOPR “contains a sensible suite of reforms to shore up” cost protections and reliability of the U.S. electricity system “based on clear market signals about generation development and demand, the risks of extreme weather, and the increasing threat of cyber- and physical attacks,” she said.
Commissioners Christie and Phillips Concurred With Order
Commissioners Willie Phillips and Mark Christie concurred with the order.
“The record here appears to show that transmission expansion is increasingly occurring in a piecemeal and inefficient fashion outside of the regional transmission planning process, which may not be cost-effective for consumers in the long run,” said Phillips.
“While commenters’ views vary on how best to address this problem, nearly all commenters endorse some form of proactive planning for the future resource mix and demand,” he said in the concurrence.
“I believe the NOPR proposal to require long-term scenario planning, including accounting for extreme weather events, is necessary to maintain the reliability of the grid and to ensure that transmission costs are just and reasonable,” wrote Phillips. “I also note that while this NOPR proposes to require the evaluation of benefits of long-term regional transmission facilities over a 20-year time horizon, it does not propose to prescribe any particular definition of ‘benefits’ or ‘beneficiaries,’ nor require use of any specific benefit.”
Commissioner Christie noted in his concurrence that the NOPR “will formally put the states — for the first time — at the center of regional transmission planning and cost allocation decision-making for policy-driven projects in all regional transmission entities, if the states choose.”
The NOPR “will shift the risk of financing policy-driven projects from consumers back to developers, where it should be.”
He said that he “will not support any final rule that exceeds our FPA authority and/or threatens to cause unjust and unreasonable rates to consumers.”
Commissioner Danly dissents
In his dissent, Commissioner Danly said that while he welcomes long term transmission planning reform, he would prefer that Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and other interested utilities “simply file their own proposals” under section 205 of the FPA. “They are fully capable of proposing rate changes and reforms on their own,” he wrote.
The NOPR “goes far beyond that. It contemplates a Federal Power Act section 206 finding that existing transmission planning across the nation—in every region, for every utility and market—is so unjust and unreasonable that it must be replaced with mandatory, pervasive, and invasive ‘reforms,’” Danly argued.
He further asserted that the NOPR’s “primary purpose is to achieve narrow environmental policy objectives, not to address legitimate requirements under the Federal Power Act like ensuring just and reasonable rates or reliability.”
While he believes the NOPR is a mistake, “I am happy to be convinced that particular reforms are justified by sound legal argument and solid record evidence,” Danly went on to say. “Where reform is needed to ensure just and reasonable rates and reliable service, and the reform itself is just and reasonable, I can be persuaded that it is worthy of support.”
But he reiterated his strong preference that FERC allow utilities to file their own transmission planning solutions under FPA section 205.
He said that if the Commission really believes that it cannot rely on utilities to seek more efficient transmission planning of their own volition, “my second option would be to issue section 206 orders requiring the RTOs to show cause why their existing transmission planning processes are just and reasonable. Whether you agree or disagree with these alternative procedural vehicles for change, please say so in your comments.”
California Public Power Utilities To Participate In DOE “Vehicle to Everything” Initiative
April 25, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
April 25, 2022
The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and partners on April 20 announced the Vehicle to Everything (V2X) memorandum of understanding (MOU), which will bring together resources from DOE, DOE national labs, state and local governments, utilities, and private entities to evaluate technical and economic feasibility as the country integrates bidirectional charging into energy infrastructure.
Included among the MOU signatories are two public power utilities — Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
The MOU will also advance cybersecurity as a core component of V2X charging infrastructure, DOE said.
Bidirectional plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) “present immense potential for increasing the country’s energy security, resilience, economic vitality, and quality of life while supporting the electrical grid. A bidirectional EV fleet could serve as both a sustainable mobility option as well as an energy storage asset that sends power back to everything from critical loads and homes to the grid. A bidirectional fleet could also create new revenue opportunities for EV owners or fleets,” DOE said.
DOE also announced that it is tackling the technical challenges and barriers to the integration of tens of millions of EVs with the electric grid, commonly referred to as Vehicle Grid Integration (VGI) through the EVs@scale lab consortium.
The consortium brings together six DOE national laboratories to conduct RD&D in the areas of smart charge management, high power charging and facilities, dynamic wireless charging, codes and standards, and cyber physical security.
In addition to addressing the near-term challenges to VGI to benefit all electric vehicle (EV) stakeholders, the lab consortium will conduct high risk, high reward research on the EV charging and grid integration technologies the U.S. will need in the future, according to DOE.
DOE said that this collaboration can accelerate and enable bidirectional PEV integration into the electrical grid by:
- Identifying and resolving barriers
- Accelerating commercialization and customer adoption
- Factoring in security by design and improving coordination between the electric and automotive sectors through establishing cybersecure bidirectional charging station demonstrations,
- Collecting and analyzing demonstration data, and
- Preparing technoeconomic analyses to evaluate the business case for V2X.
Click here for the MOU.
Energy Storage Will Grow Quickly, NREL Report Says
April 25, 2022
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
April 25, 2022
Energy storage deployments could grow rapidly in the coming decades, reaching between 130 gigawatts (GW) and 680 GW by 2050, enough to support renewable generation of 80 percent or higher, according to a new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The report, Storage Futures Study: Key Learnings for the Coming Decades, which is the seventh and final of NREL’s Storage Futures Study (SFS) series launched in 2020, argues that energy storage will likely play a critical role in a low-carbon, flexible, and resilient future grid.
“Each phase of the study has indicated a potential coming wave of energy storage, with U.S. installed storage capacity increasing by at least five times by 2050,” Nate Blair, principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. “Overall, we find energy storage offers significant value, from easier grid operations to fewer costly thermal start-ups to reduced emissions.”
Among the key findings, the report found that diurnal storage is economically competitive across a variety of scenarios that include a range of cost and performance assumptions for storage, as well as power generated from wind, solar, or natural gas. “Even the most conservative case represents a fivefold increase compared to the installed storage capacity of 23 GW in 2020,” the majority of which is pumped storage hydropower, the report’s authors said.
NREL’s modelling indicated that “significant deployments” of both renewable energy and energy storage could be deployed even without additional carbon policies, which, the authors said, demonstrates their increasing cost-competitiveness as resources for provision of energy and capacity services.”
And while “stacking” the functions that energy storage devices can perform, which runs from time shifting peak demand to avoiding new transmission investments, the ability of storage to provide firm capacity to offset the need for conventional generation to meet peak demand is “critical to realizing its full potential,” the authors found.
NREL’s models also showed that increased levels of energy storage deployment flatten the peak load curve and thus increases the amount of stored energy required to provide firm capacity and to continue reducing net peak demand. That could present opportunities for emerging technologies capable of longer durations, or even for the next generation of existing long-duration technologies such as pumped storage hydropower, the report’s authors said.
However, the report’s authors also noted that widescale electrification of heating could shift the peak load to the winter for much of the United States, which would create longer peaks that are more difficult to meet with storage and solar power. If that occurs, it could increase the value of wind generation and longer-duration storage, the report said.
And even though energy storage is highly competitive as a new source of peaking capacity without carbon dioxide mitigation policies in place, “it is important to recognize that technology or policy changes could affect the growth prospects of energy storage,” the report noted.
“Despite important modifications to regulatory frameworks over the past decade, storage remains a challenging technology to appropriately value and compensate, particularly in restructured markets,” the authors wrote. “If storage is not compensated fairly, it could result in nonoptimal storage deployment.”
The report also noted that flexibility will be key to decarbonizing the power sector at least cost and that will likely require a variety of resources, some of which may cost less than energy storage. “Establishing better characterization of demand response, flexible loads’ realistic contribution potential, and cost is critical to better understanding the opportunities for energy storage,” the authors said.
The Key Learnings report modeled hundreds of future scenarios and added new capabilities to NREL’s publicly available Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) capacity expansion model to represent the value of diurnal battery energy storage. To simulate grid operations in the ReEDS scenarios, NREL used the commercially available PLEXOS production cost model. On the distribution side, NREL added new storage capabilities to its open-source Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen) model to simulate customer adoption of solar-plus-storage systems under different battery and backup-power value assumptions.
FERC Directs Grid Operators To Report On Changing System Needs, Plans
April 25, 2022
by APPA News
April 25, 2022
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on April 21 directed the operators of six regional organized electric power markets to provide information regarding their changing system needs and plans for potential reforms.
The California Independent System Operator Corp., ISO New England, Inc., Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc., New York Independent System Operator, Inc., PJM Interconnection, L.L.C., and Southwest Power Pool, Inc. have 180 days to file reports in response to the order.
The order follows a staff whitepaper and four technical conferences conducted in 2021 that explored the changing nature of the organized markets and their operations.
The Commission received comments on the potential challenges associated with “one size fits all” solutions and is gathering additional information from each market operator to better understand how their unique resource mixes and load profiles impact their respective system needs across all their markets and their respective plans to address those needs.
Reports are expected to comprehensively address current system needs given recent changes in resource mixes and load profiles; operator expectations regarding system needs over the next five years and ten years; whether and how each market operator plans to reform its markets to meet expected system needs.
Public comments are due 60 days following the filing of the reports. The Commission will review the reports and comments to determine whether further action is appropriate.