Planning, collaboration prepare a 21st-century grid against non-stop challenges
The increasing severity and number of extreme weather events, coupled with the need to meet exploding load growth, are making collaboration and planning across the energy industry evermore critical in preparing and maintaining a reliable power grid.
“Disaster planning and resiliency planning and reliability is really work that is 24/7,” said Maria Pope, president and CEO of Portland General Electric (PGE), during the Feb. 1 United States Energy Association (USEA) virtual press briefing.
Such ongoing planning was put to the test earlier this month when Winter Storm Gerri brought subfreezing temperatures, high winds, and a mix of freezing precipitation into PGE’s service territory in Oregon, knocking out power for several days.
The investor-owned utility saw temps fall to windchill -40 degrees in some areas of the Pacific Northwest, setting up a situation in which the region’s gas supply was disrupted, renewables did not operate, and wind/solar were nonexistent, Pope said.
“And we saw extensive outages with more than 500,000 customer outages,” she said.
Gerri also blasted the Midwest with heavy snow and blizzard conditions and helped usher in brutally cold air across much of the Central United States. The storm was also responsible for rare blizzard conditions in the Northwest and for flooding in the coastal Northeast.
To deal with it, Pope said part of PGE’s year-round planning and collaboration called for putting 1,800 individuals in the field to restore power. They accomplished that within eight days throughout three different waves of outages that took place.
“It was incredibly disruptive, not only to the power sector, but to transportation, water — across the board,” Pope said. “The implications of extreme weather are severe and it’s why we work so closely with our communities and with others across the state and across the entire West to ensure that we are well prepared.”
Other IOUs, as well as regional transmission organizations (RTOs), are also involved in such planning, collaboration, and information-sharing.
PJM, for instance, an RTO that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity through all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, closely collaborates with its member utilities and all of the generation operators, according to David Souder, executive director of system operations at PJM.
“Collaboration is essential,” Souder said. “Having up-to-date information is key so we’re making good decisions that are reliable and economical.”
Preparation for an extreme cold event like Winter Storm Gerri started well in advance, he said, and also included a lot of close collaboration with PJM’s transmission owners.
And while there’s also plenty of internal coordination, Souder said there’s a lot of coordination with PJM’s neighbors.
“For instance, it’s not uncommon that about a week prior to an oncoming weather event, we’ll start having daily calls to get a good understanding of where our neighbors are with respect to their reserves; to ensure we’re canceling any major outages and restoring transmissions so we can move the energy around to assist our neighbors,” said Souder.
Pope said such cooperation and planning is essential to tackle the growing number and heightened impacts of such destructive weather.
“I would love to say that these are 1-in-10-year events or 1-in-20-year events, but now they are a one-in-two or one-in-three year event,” she said.
At the same time, an incredible amount of collaboration exists between the American utility industry and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on planning a path forward for both a transition and a transformation of the grid, according to Gene Rodrigues, Assistant Secretary of DOE’s Office of Electricity.
“What this industry is doing is planning for a 21st century power grid, and it is going to take investment, changes in operations, and changes in planning due to the wild differences we’ve seen in extreme weather events both in terms of number and in their ferocity,” said Rodrigues. “All of these things must be dealt with in adaptation mode but in a planning mode for the future.”
What’s unseen to most folks, added Rodrigues, is the sheer amount of collaboration and coordination that goes on in real time.
“It is amazing. It’s not just engineering — it really is about people collaborating, sharing information, and making operational decisions,” he said.
Extreme weather isn’t the only challenge facing IOUs this year. In many areas there is load growth of up to 8 percent from an expanding population, particularly in the South, according to the USEA, and on the horizon is huge new growth in demand from the servers that will support artificial intelligence (AI), which is expanding exponentially. There are also clean energy goals to consider.
“There’s no question that as we transform the energy sector to a clean energy environment, we’re dealing with a remarkable shift in the external climate that’s driving our work, but we’re also seeing extensive new energy usage,” said Pope.
Combined, all of these things are providing unique challenges and unique opportunities that PGE meets by also utilizing meteorological data, AI and machine learning, and all of the tools that allow the utility to respond quickly to changes, she added.
“There’s no question that we’re all integrated and working together in vastly different ways on preparation in advance of key events and minute-to-minute during key events that can go on for days,” Pope said.
