POWER RESILIENCE, GRID STABILITY & UTILITY VIABILITY

BY PAMELA HAMBLIN

Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? While congress debates permitting reform, what technologies could help us get more energy on the wires, and what does this mean for the energy transition goals?

Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? Here are three things to know. First, connecting a big power source to the grid means getting in line. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a typical project’s wait time has increased from around two years in 2005 to four years in 2021. Second, the interconnection queue is crowded. In April 2022, there were 1,400 gigawatts of projects in the queue. That’s more than the U.S.’s current fleet of generation. Third, dropouts are the norm. Only 25% of projects make it to completion. Why the bottleneck and long queues? Lack of transmission is the single biggest factor. We need more of it to bring power from rural areas with rich wind and solar potential to power-hungry population centers. But opposition and a complex permitting process have slowed the construction of new transmission to a glacial pace. While congress debates permitting reform, what technologies could help us get more energy on the wires, and what does this mean for the energy transition goals?

Energy Then vs. Energy Now

Energy has been historically generated by a centralized power plant. I visited a ghost town in California that was one of the state’s first gold-mining communities. Several power lines ran straight over the mountains through the Redwood Forest. They were straight because they didn’t know power could turn corners. This is where we were 150 years ago, and that’s the grid we still have. Most of our transmission and distribution lines were built 150 years ago. The average legacy facility can create 500 megawatts of power. With renewables, we get an average of 1 megawatt out of one renewable generating station. To decommission these aging legacy units, we must replace them with many decentralized units of renewable generating capacity.

Integrating Alternative Energy

We are harnessing renewable energy resources, and by doing that, we’re going from centralized to decentralized power generation. That requires energy production and transporting it into a multi-lane, multidirection highway. It’s impossible to power in two directions on the same line. It is taking a lot of financial and infrastructure rebuilding to replace these lines and create transmission lines, the big ones that go down the highway that can take centralized power to local communities. The ones that jog off those to our towns and counties are our distribution centers. It’s like a spider web. This multidirectional energy fluctuation with transportation going one way of energy and another way of energy is creating a lot of instability in our grid and a lot of fluctuation affecting our reliability.

Utility Challenges

Utilities manage our power demand right now. Caught between a rock and a hard place, utilities are in jeopardy of going out of business because they can’t compete in our market. There are aging units creating these 500 megawatts of power with consistent demand. They were built in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re at the end of their life, and we’re not building any more of them; however, we’re not at a place where we can decommission them yet because we can’t get the power, the two-way traffic, of these transmission lines yet. There are massive financial penalties for the failure of the utilities to meet the carbon emission goals. These requirements are in place without a way of feasibly getting there.

Coal Generation

There were 230 operational coal-fired plants in the U.S. in 2021. Those facilities generated 23% of our U.S. electricity in 2021. Coal was 19% of our generating capacity. Between 2010 and 2019, 40% of the coal generation was closed. Currently, we have 230; those are all slated to close in the next few years.

Plans for Closing

Many coal facilities were planned to close years ago. They’re failing because they’ve reached the end of life but are still operating—and operating outside of their design. For every plant we decommission, we must replace it with a new generation capacity because demand isn’t going down. If anything, it’s increasing. If we decommission 500 megawatts, we must replace that. The renewable microgrid average is about 500 kilowatts per generation. You would need two of those to replace 1 megawatt. We need about 1,000 microgrids to replace the legacy of one generating capacity.

Integrating Renewables

Everybody thinks that the utilities are just giving them a hard time. Why can’t we get this power on the grid? Why can’t we get approval? Why are utilities standing in our way? It’s not. It’s because the transmission lines can’t handle it. There are interconnection regions within our nation. Then there are also wholesale power markets. You have to get approval through the interconnection, meaning the transmission lines of your district. Then you have to figure out if you’re in one of the wholesale markets where power is traded as a commodity.

Regulated vs. Deregulated Markets

The regulated market is if you’re in a nonwholesale market. If you’re in a wholesale market, you’re in a deregulated market. When we are regulated, you have the consumer, a local electric company, and a power plant. You get your electricity directly from your local electric company, which gets it from the power plants they own. If you’re in a deregulated wholesale market, you buy electricity from your local electric company, which participates in a commodity market of energy through multiple power stations, and they can only compete on the fuel price.

Wholesale Energy Market

The wholesale market dictates a lot of what our fuel and energy prices will be. When you see the price of your electricity increase, it costs the utility more for your energy.

Energy is a commodity just like the stock market, and utilities buy and sell it. When they bid into the market, they must have availability.

They typically must start up in about 30 minutes. They have to be able to do that multiple times a day or week, and they have to ramp to full load within a minimum timeframe. If there’s intermittency in solar or wind power, the coal or the gas must ramp up immediately.

A typical power plant takes about 18 hours to go from a cold start to a full power load. But they have 30 minutes to get online. And if they don’t, they pay the price. So they keep these units on a low-load operation. They leave them units running. They’re dumping fuel and power because they can’t put it on the grid and leaving it warm so they can get there quickly.

It’s not efficient, and it’s running the units into the ground. What was already at the end of life is exponentially deteriorating, and failure is evident. They were slated to be out of service years ago; instead, they are extending the life. It’s a scary situation.

Interconnection Regions

There are four interconnection regions. If you

Pamela Hamblin CEO, Nuenergy Solutions Deerfield Beach, Florida

lose power on the Western Interconnection, you cannot go to the Eastern to borrow or buy power. Texas had a problem with a storm a few years ago because they are their own interconnection region. When that went down, they couldn’t get power from anywhere else. They are investing a lot of money in their interconnection and transmission distribution right now.

Queue of Interconnection

Projects to get renewable integration onto our grid cannot be approved until the grid can handle renewable generation. The grid must get upgraded: transmission distribution, sensors, substations, etc. 73%—998 gigawatts—has a proposed online date by the end of 2024. Only 13% of those, 183 gigawatts, have an executed interconnection agreement, meaning they can build now; it’s been approved. The grid can handle only 13%, and it will take a couple of years to get those built. Do you see how far behind the curve we are?

With over 25 years in management, business development, and operations in the energy sector, Pamela Hamblin has a vast knowledge of the dynamics involved in delivering safe, reliable, resilient, and affordable power. Having worked with centralized legacy and distributed renewable generation, she has a “big picture” understanding of the challenges facing the integration toward carbon neutralization. Her expertise spans energy generation, transmission, distribution, and energy markets. She has trusted relationships with many corporate-level power executives and has been published in numerous industry publications.