from Climate Etc.

by Planning Engineer (Russell Schussler)

There are many reasons why grid experts within the electric utility industry have not spoken out when unrealistic “green” goals were being developed and promoted over the last 20 years or so. A more open debate during this period might have helped provide a more realistic foundation for future development.  This posting describes some reasons as to why at the corporate level electric utilities did not speak out more in defense of grid reliability.  Collectively these factors tended to eliminate grid experts from playing any role in the development of policies impacting the grid.

Speaking Out Risked Negative Consequences

Utilities have many stakeholders with varying degrees of power.  Utilities depend on good relations with Public Service Commissions, other regulators, consumers and policy makers. The stereotype of electric utilities as uncaring, selfish, greedy destroyers of the environment tends to make utilities very cautious and careful in critiquing anything perceived as “green”.  The media and press attention from any such statements would likely not be favorable.

Utilities need support to acquire right-of-way, for financing, for cost-recovery and to avoid adverse legislation. Poor press and the associated public disapproval loomed as strong disincentives for speaking out.  Furthermore, as will be discussed later, expressing concerns over emerging reliability issues, could be interpreted by some as implying that perhaps you were not as capable as others appear to be.

The Waiting Game: Short-Term versus Long-Term Goals

The short-term consequences of objecting to “green” initiatives impact were swift and near and would be specifically painful to the offending party. The potential benefits of speaking out on reliability would be collective, diffuse and farther into the future.  Who as one of hundreds of utilities would want to be the first to speak out?  The near-term burden of “green” goals at very low penetration levels was small enough that it might seem prudent to wait for others to speak up.

It can be observed already how these reasons worked together to stifle dissent. Areas with greatest pressures for green initiatives were held back because speaking out would have more severe consequences for them.  Areas with lesser pressures were also less likely to be impacted in the near term, so they were less incentivized to speak out.  Many hoped that maybe they could ride this out and learn from the mistakes of others.  Unfortunately, mistakes and problems don’t seem to be slowing things down.

Utilities Are Not Experts, But Rather a Collection of Experts

There is not a common single body of expertise commonly shared by the many experts that make up an electric utility.  Rather than are many experts with differing areas of expertise with demands that can place them at conflict with those operating within other areas of expertise.  Effectively managing an electric utility is highly dependent upon balancing the input of many competing “experts”.  The goals and priorities of large areas such budgeting, rates, maintenance, operating, environmental, planning, construction, compliance, marketing, R&D, legal, strategic planning. as well as sub areas within these, will often be in conflict as to the actions a utility should take.  Leaders have to weigh the inputs from these areas to provide direction and make decisions.

Competing Experts and Goals

Healthy competition is good and necessary.  The goals of maintenance are worthwhile, but sometimes in order to best utilize our resources and address other concerns, utilities might need to temporarily depart from what the maintenance experts advocate.  The experts in projects tell us how long it should take to complete a project.  But in emergencies, other experts might insist that this project must be completed in a much shorter time frame to allow for an upcoming summer peak. Transmission planning and distribution planning experts within the utility might favor different solutions for correcting an area problem: do you beef up the area distribution or do you add more support from the transmission system?  With conflicts of this sort, sometimes you find a compromise, but in others one set of experts must give in.

There are many incentives for increasing wind and solar generation (if it works).  For some areas of expertise, wind and solar integration pose no special problems.  Experts and executives from these areas often were wind and solar boosters.  Similarly to academics as described in a previous post, some utility experts argued that (some) problems with wind and solar could be solved, and it was often mistakenly interpreted to mean all problems could be solved.

During my career I would manage several different areas that at times would be in conflict.  I would tell my key people, “You are the experts here.  You must be a strong advocate for your area of responsibilities.  Sometimes I and others in upper management will have to place other concerns over yours. You will need to be a team player and accept the situation.  That doesn’t mean you should be any less of an advocate for these concerns  in future situations.”   Good management balances the inputs of different experts. Utilities found that near term imperatives were in conflict with more distant reliability concerns. Unfortunately, it was almost exclusively the case that emerging reliability concerns were judged as something better addressed later.

Margin, Experts, and Who Are You Going to Believe?

In advocating for their specific areas of concerns, often experts will build in a little margin.  I’ll use the example of budgeting here.  Although it took me while to get on board, many people are probably familiar with how that process works.  Initially when we I would hear of dire budget woes, I would heed the call and cut things as close to the bone as I could.  Those of you who are not as naïve as I once was, know that the next step is to squeeze even more out of EVERYONE.  At that point it didn’t matter what you had given up in step 1, more was needed and everyone must contribute.  My nature was to be a team player and head the original call, but after getting burned a few times, I learned that I must play the margin game.

Competing experts should be “expected” to build in margin within their various areas of expertise.  The projects area may pad their schedules with some extra time to give themselves some flexibility.  Maintenance might aggressively schedule maintenance and replacement so that they are ok if hard times later put a cut in their resources.  Initial designs of projects may be “Cadillac” level to better survive cost pushbacks which might emerge under review.

In  the area of grid reliability, the grid depends on margin.  It should survive without a hiccup for once every 50-year events, because hundreds or more of those type events can and will happen in the normal operation of a system. Conflations of equipment outages, extreme weather,  and other unanticipated events hit the grid many times during a given year.  The consequences can be huge.  However, if you push back on reliability for a short time in one area, there’s a good chance you will be fine.  Negative consequences will likely be unobservable.  But continue to do so and  severe consequences will begin to emerge.

The large chorus of outside “experts” saying that wind and solar can be integrated successfully complicated the situation.  Executives with other responsibilities see that government, academics, consultants, consumers, policy makers, and experts within parts of the utility industry are all pushing higher levels of wind and solar.  Similarly, the industry sponsored research arms did not help much, but rather pushed new technology as well.  Perhaps because they saw a “gold mine” in potential “green research projects”.  This all lead to confusion around grid capabilities.

Lastly, grid experts were disregarded partly due to their great success in the past.   The fact that modern power systems have a high degree of margin makes it harder to argue that the system is not sufficiently robust to allow for high penetration levels of wind and solar. The ability of grid engineers to meet emerging challenges to-date have led many to believe they could continue to do so, not matter what might be thrown at them.

Specialization and Silos

In additions to problems of breadth of expertise, problems around  specialization also confound attempts at expert consensus.  Understanding the full extent of emerging grid reliability problems requires an understanding of generation planning, transmission planning and systems operations. Intermittent, asynchronous wind and solar energy sources impact generation planning, transmission planning and system operators. These three areas have differing expertise and experts within these areas that are not always well informed of the concerns of the others.  Generation planners are concerned with providing generation 24 hours a day 367 days a year far into the future.  They assume transmission planners will take care of delivery problems.   Generation modelling is focused on energy production and they look at megawatt-hours.  Transmission Planners are worried about the transmission system during peak times of stress. They make efforts to understand the implications of potential generation, but intermittent sources make that challenging.  Their focus is based on demand levels so they look at megawatts.  System Operators worry about issues of generation and transmission but they operate day to day and in the near term.  Their focus is on dealing with the system as it is, not determining what it might be or handle scenarios in the far future.   Further within these areas, there are specialists who go deep and do not well understand the problems within their own broader area.

Within critical areas around grid reliability, there are various specialist who may not see the big picture. For example, those who model the transmission system who may see problems now, may be optimistic or agnostic as to how future versions of wind and solar may work to better support the system.  Those who work more directly with  wind and solar and know their inherent capabilities probably don’t fully understand their impact on the transmission system.  It takes an understanding of both areas to see the   emerging problems that are confronting the system.

Hope and the Benefit of the Doubt

Despite what you may have heard, most engineers want to be environmentally responsible. Instead of being opposed to new technology, most of us have sought to support potential “green” applications that had at least small hopes of promise.  I was never aware of anyone stacking the deck against “green” options, but the reverse frequently occurred.   It’s evident that conventional generation options are productive many years longer than competing solar or wind  options, but most comparative analyses assumed 30 year lives for all alternatives including Green ones.  I don’t know of any significant objections to wind and solar leaning on the system a little for support, or raising costs a little.  The concerns only came when the impacts are particularly egregious or approaching unsustainability.

The support for “Green” options extended to optimistic assumptions about future development, performance and capabilities of those resources.  Often instead of focusing on what might be probable in the future, utilities hoped for what might be possible.  Many have hoped that maybe wind and solar coupled with batteries and a lot of technological development will allow asynchronous intermittent wind and solar to replace higher levels of conventional synchronous generation.  Such hopes have for many clouded the clear evidence that increasing levels of wind and solar presented reliability threats.

FERC and NERC’s Impacts

In the U.S., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the reliability oversight organization (NERC) that they empowered, have served to inhibit the industry from voicing reliability concerns.  FERC’s open access policy and the resultant standards of conduct in 1996 have segregated the functions of generation planning and transmission planning.  FERC’s goal was to prevent generation providers, who owned transmission as well, from having any competitive advantage over other generation providers. Previously, managers and VPs might have responsibility for both groups (as I did at one point), but FERC required that those functions be separated and it was important that information not be shared between them. FERC effectively shut down reliability discussions between in-house generation experts and transmission experts.  Coordinating a reliable grid was well served by interplay, dialogue and coordination between those planning and managing generation and transmission. Understanding emerging problems similarly is best served by having experts with a sound grounding in both generation and transmission.

NERC and the regional reliability entities initially were formed and controlled by the utilities to coordinate reliability efforts amongst the participants.  In 2006 FERC established NERC as the national reliability organization with enforcement powers. Making NERC the master over utilities versus their servant has had various consequences. Beginning in 2007, NERC and the regional entities could impose large fines for violating NERCs’ reliability criteria. Before that time, utilities would share any problems that they were seeing at reliability meetings, they were seeing as well as emerging concerns in an open and frank manner.  Despite utilities differences in some areas there was a strong joint commitment to reliability and all felt it was best to learn from each other’s mistakes. But when the regulators had the ability to impose fines of a million dollars a day, it no longer made sense to share reliability concerns.  Publicly expressing reliability concerns might predispose NERC to lean towards findings of noncompliance should problems emerge.

Perhaps the greatest impact came in the shift of responsibilities. Utilities used to have responsibility for ensuring reliability.  They had skin in the game. They had a number of tools including generation and transmission options to better ensure reliability.  But regulation by FERC through NERC, took the reliability function away from utilities.  Utilities are no longer responsible for ensuring reliability.  They are responsible for compliance with reliability standards.    That was a profound and consequential change. Utilities are no longer developing reliability experts; they are developing experts in standards compliance.  When outages occur, it’s hard to figure out where blame lies now.   Will there ever again be grid experts who have skin in the game again?

Summary and Conclusions

There were a lot of utility experts with grid concerns.  You might ask, “Why didn’t more people speak up?” But maybe the better question is, “Why would anyone speak up?”  A lot of people could have said the type things I started saying about a decade ago, but they had  no incentives to speak out and there were few influential people who cared to listen.  In summary:

• There were few to no near-term incentives for individual utility experts or for utilities corporately to speak up as regard planned threats to reliability
• There were significant near-term disincentives for speaking up
• Limited to no platforms for voicing concerns
• Waiting and hoping for others to speak up seemed a prudent path for many
• Competing “experts” and diverse areas of specialization confused understandings of risk
• Past success of grid experts made it harder to take future reliability threats seriously
• Strong widely present desires support “clean” wind and solar
• Federal Actions served to quite dissenting voices and eventual remove dissenting experts

The days of utility-based grid experts who’ve had skin in the game are over. Utility experts are charged with complying with reliability standards rather than maintaining reliability.  Where utilities once had variety of tools at their disposal to better foresee and forestall reliability problems, utilities now follow compliance standards and hope for the best.

From MasterResource

By Ed Ireland — May 4, 2023

Ed Note: “Electric natural gas compressors contributed to the near collapse of the Texas power grid in 2021,” Ed Ireland argues below. “All U.S. power grids face the same risk.” His first-hand knowledge of this instance of ‘deep decarbonization’ politics gets to the why-behind-the-why of the still-debated Texas blackout, the worst electricity debacle in the history of the industry.

“The anti-fossil fuel movement started pressuring North Texas cities and towns to require electric compressors on natural gas pipelines based on arguments that the air pollution from natural gas-powered compressors was causing increased asthma and other health problems…. I said that electrifying natural gas pipeline compressors was a terrible idea that could affect the availability of natural gas when it was needed most, such as during bad weather events. Unfortunately, I lost that debate….”

A recent article in The Electricity Journal pointed out that the natural gas pipeline network in the U.S. is vulnerable to electricity outages. How can that be? Surprisingly, critical parts of the U.S. natural gas pipeline grid now depend on electricity.

The study, which the authors say is the first rigorous effort to identify the number of U.S. electric compressor stations, examined data from 2008 to 2020 and found that:

During times of high gas demand, electric outages that disable compressors at these stations can significantly reduce gas available to downstream generating stations. In some cases, the resulting outages could be as large as or larger than the most severe single-cause failure currently considered in electric reliability planning (emphasis added).

Of these outages, they determined that several areas of the country were especially vulnerable to electric outages:

California, the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, and the East have high levels of installed electric compressor capacity. New hydraulic models, verified by past events, show that disrupting power to a single pipeline compressor station can force a loss greater than 2 gigawatts of downstream gas generators (emphasis added).

It is not generally known that natural gas pipelines have, little by little and under the radar, become increasingly dependent on electricity. Recall the parable of a frog in a pot of water that is gradually heated to boiling, but the frog overlooks the danger until it is too late. This describes the electrification of natural gas pipelines that occurred so slowly that it was virtually unnoticed.

The electrification of gas pipelines occurred as the compressors, which are required to keep the gas moving through pipelines, were changed from natural gas to electricity. Compressors are necessary to keep the natural gas moving through the pipeline network. The average distance between compressor stations in interstate pipelines in the U.S. varies, but compressors are usually required every 50 to 100 miles. If any of these compressors fail, the entire pipeline shuts down completely.

Based on their findings, the authors suggest that electric utilities immediately incorporate the identified facilities into critical facilities lists. The authors’ findings support the recommendations of a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:

In contrast to well-established reliability reporting and standards for the electrical system, the gas system has almost no reliability transparency or oversight.” Establishing a federal gas reliability organization, comparable to what is now done for electric power, could improve gas reliability by establishing appropriate reliability reporting, incident investigation, and minimum industry standards.

Background

From the beginning of natural gas pipelines, compressors were powered by natural gas. That made sense because the pipelines were full of natural gas, so pipelines powered themselves. But gradually, compressors were electrified so slowly that, to follow the parable, they, like the frog, didn’t notice what was about to happen.

I observed the early phase of the movement to replace natural gas-fired compressors with electric gas compressors starting around 2010 when I was Executive Director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. As the Barnett Shale developed in the early 2000s, thousands of natural gas wells were drilled, many in urban areas, and pipelines and compressor stations were constructed to carry the natural gas to markets.

The anti-fossil fuel movement started pressuring North Texas cities and towns to require electric compressors on natural gas pipelines based on arguments that the air pollution from natural gas-powered compressors was causing increased asthma and other health problems. In 2012, the Denton City Council invited me to participate in their project to rewrite city ordinances that regulate natural gas drilling and pipelines.

I distinctly recall a public meeting in which I said that electrifying natural gas pipeline compressors was a terrible idea that could affect the availability of natural gas when it was needed most, such as during bad weather events. Unfortunately, I lost that debate, and the City of Denton changed its city ordinances to require electric natural gas compressors within its city limits. Similar ordinances quickly spread to other municipalities within the state of Texas and eventually to other natural gas-producing states that pipelines pass through.

As shown in the map above, the use of electric compressors on gas pipelines has now become so pervasive that the entire interstate natural gas pipeline network is effectively compromised. An interruption in the generation of electricity can cause some natural gas pipelines to shut down, which interrupts other parts of the natural gas pipeline grid and potentially shuts down multiple pipelines.

An early indicator of the problems caused by the electrification of natural gas pipelines was Winter Storm Uri which hit Texas and much of the nation in February 2021. This was detailed in my article “The Texas power grid was minutes from collapsing in 2021 and declaring an emergency in 2022.”

Here’s what happened. The entire state of Texas was hit by Winter Storm Uri, which resulted in all 254 counties in the state experiencing below-freezing temperatures, with much of the state temperatures in the teens and below zero in some areas for almost an entire week. Freezing temperatures affected all forms of electrical generation, starting with frozen wind turbines, freeze-offs at natural gas wells, and even problems with coal-fired generators and nuclear power generation plants.

As the temperatures dropped and people turned up their heat, the demand for electricity exceeded the supply, and rolling blackouts were ordered to maintain the integrity of the electrical grid. The grid operator, ERCOT, ordered rolling blackouts to balance supply and demand. Unfortunately, some local electricity companies did not have good information on the location of natural gas wells and compressor stations, so some blackouts shut down natural gas wells and pipeline compressors. In turn, this reduced the natural gas supply to gas-fired power generators. This caused a death spiral in electricity generation to the point where the Texas grid was within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of completely collapsing.

After Winter Storm Uri, ERCOT and the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) recognized that they did not have good data on the location of critical natural gas pipeline infrastructure, including natural gas wells with on-site compressors and the location of all natural gas pipeline compressors that operate on electricity, in addition to the critical customers that depend on electricity to maintain their supply of natural gas.

The RRC highlighted the importance of this information by establishing a new department, the Critical Infrastructure Division, which maintains up-to-date data on all infrastructure required to maintain natural gas supplies to power generators. The RRC published new rules that require gas pipeline operators to provide that information and keep it updated on an ongoing basis.

While Winter Storm Uri caused the Texas power grid problems in 2021, such problems can be caused by the destabilizing impact of wind and solar on power grids, for example. If a sudden decline of wind and solar results in disruptions of electricity, natural gas pipelines can be shut down, which causes a domino effect of more power outages. With more power grids sounding alarms about the instabilities caused by wind and solar, power grids are increasingly facing blackouts and the resulting shut-downs of natural gas pipelines that, in turn, can cause a loss of electric generating capacity.

Where do we go from here?

U.S. power grids have been warning that they are destabilized by wind and solar power generation. Add to that the potential problems they may face as a result of the electrification of natural gas compressors, and the tenuous situation becomes clear.

More power grid operators need to consider their own versions of the rules that ERCOT and the Texas Railroad Commission are implementing.

—————

Ed Ireland, adjunct professor at TCU’s Neeley School of Business, received his B.S. from Midwestern State University and Ph.D. from Texas Tech University. This analysis was originally posted at Thoughts About Energy and Economics (free subscription).