The U.S. Department of Energy last week unveiled two reports focused on the crucial interstate electric transmission system, proposing both a roadmap for getting onto the grid and how strengthen the road itself. The inadequate U.S. high-voltage grids are perhaps the greatest obstacle to a low-carbon electric future.
Last Tuesday (April 16), the agency rolled out ways to beef up the path from generation to distribution. It’s billed as a way “to accelerate deployment of key commercially available but underutilized advanced grid solutions on the existing transmission and distribution system to address near-term hotspots and modernize the grid to prepare for a wide range of energy futures.”
The same day, the agency unveiled its “DOE Transmission Interconnection Roadmap: Transforming Bulk Transmission Interconnection by 2035.” This paper looks at how to get on the high-voltage highway, the growing and vexing interconnection problem of too much new generation, much of it wind, solar, and storage, seeking too few timely up-ramps. DOE says its roadmap “identifies solutions to enable interconnection processes to meet the growing demand for renewable energy resources from the rapid, widespread clean energy transition.”
The 96-page “liftoff” report highlights 20 commercially economic and available grid technologies that can help the grid accommodate up to 100 GW of new peak loads, such as advanced conductors, dynamic line rating, energy storage, advanced distribution management systems, topology optimization, and communications technologies. According to the report, “Multiple advanced technologies and applications are commercially available today that grid operators and regulators can use to help address near-term hotspots and modernize the grid to prepare for a wide range of energy futures.”
The report asserts, “Collectively, these technologies—if deployed at scale—can provide a step change in grid operators’ ability to efficiently and effectively manage the grid. Grid operators can deploy these solutions in a variety of strategic combinations to address local needs; no one single solution will suffice. A strategic, longterm (e.g., 10-15+ years) investment approach is necessary to realize the optimized benefits between many of these technologies and to determine today’s foundational infrastructure investments that can fully unlock the benefits of future technology deployments.”
Optimistically, the liftoff report says transmission owners and operators can employ these approaches to expanding grid capacity within three to five years, “and are lower cost, greater value, or both when compared to conventional technologies or approaches.”
The DOE report also cautions, “Yet deployment at scale is lagging across the United States. Traditional cost-of-service IOU business models have not sufficiently incentivized these solutions to warrant the significant upfront planning, engineering, operational, and organizational effort required to deploy advanced technologies at scale. For smaller municipal utilities and electric cooperatives in particular, the upfront cost and organizational resources necessary to drive effective investment can be a particular challenge.”
Turning from the road to the roadmap, DOE looks to how to deal with the traffic jam by 2030. The report acknowledges that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been grappling with the problem with Order 2023. DOE says, “The solutions in this roadmap are intended to complement and support, not impede, Order 2023 implementation. They focus on issues that may still be unresolved in implementing Order 2023, such as how to balance stricter requirements for interconnection customers with open access and equity considerations, incentivize minimizing interconnection study delays, and better coordinate affected system studies.”
The roadmap report adds that “the solutions in this roadmap also go beyond Order 2023, addressing issues that were not raised in the order, such as data transparency, automation, interconnection studies, cost allocation, and workforce development.”
The 125-page roadmap offers 35 “solutions” to getting on the grid, focused on data access, transparency, and security for interconnection; improving interconnection process and timeline; promoting economic efficiency in interconnection; and maintaining a reliable grid.
The roadmap addresses one of the most serious problems: the cost of getting onto the grid. The report says, “Expanding options for interconnection service and proactive transmission investments should reduce uncertainty and improve allocative efficiency. If current efforts to reduce interconnection bottlenecks prove unsuccessful, transmission providers may need to consider more radical departures from the current participant funding model of interconnection cost allocation.”
The roadmap also provides four metrics for measuring whether reforms are working, all based on publicly available data. These are: “Shorter interconnection times. Lower interconnection cost variance for all projects. Increased completion rates. Lower disturbance events.”
Whether the two DOE reports will constitute for the U.S. electric grid what the Interstate Highway System meant for long-distance transportation of goods and people, or become just another accumulation of bits and bytes in the cloud is an open question. Today, it is not clear that there is a public or private institution that can assure it will happen.
–Kennedy Maize