Roger Caiazza

I have provided earlier updates from the New York State crash test dummy experiment to reach a zero-emissions electric grid by 2040 as part of its Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act). I have previously described issues identified by the organizations responsible for the electric system associated with the generating portion of this transition.  This post summarizes the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACENY) webinar “Grid Planning to Meet Climate Act Goals” that addressed the transmission challenges.

ACENY Webinar

On April 11, 2024, the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACENY) hosted a webinar entitled “Grid Planning to Meet Climate Act Goals” that was recorded on a video.  The webinar was moderated by Chris Casey, from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and featured speakers from the Department of Public Service (DPS), New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), and National Grid.  This article describes each speaker’s presentation and provides links to sections of the video so that readers can follow the presentations.

Chris Casey, a lawyer from the NRDC opened the webinar with an overview. It was not surprising that his introduction ticked all the boxes.  New York is on the “forefront of the transition to address the “impacts of destructive climate change”, increase access to “affordable” renewable energy, bolster “resilience against life-threatening extreme energy events”, all while “creating jobs and delivering substantial economic benefits”.  Behind the rhetoric, however, reality lurks, and it does not look so grand.  In the following sections I include slides and links to the section of the video that discusses the slide.

DPS Presentation

Elizabeth Grisaru (Senior Policy Advisor) from the DPS made the first presentation “Planning for Future Electric System Needs”.  One of her main job responsibilities is transmission planning associated with the Climate Act transition.  During her introduction she included a slide that illustrates the connections between generators and customers that were the focus of the webinar.

Since the inception of the Climate Act, DPS has begun several initiatives.  These projects total $6 billion over and above what is needed to keep the system running.  The investments are for both Climate Act needs and reliability issues.  What was not included was the breakdown between the two needs or any estimate of how much more will be needed.  Clearly many more investments will be required.

The transition to an electric system that depends upon diffuse wind and solar requires a significant upgrade to the transmission system.  The PSC has a new “Coordinated Grid Planning Process” to address this issue.  However, the first report will not be available until the fall of 2025.  The Climate Act has an interim 2030 electric grid target of 70% power from renewable sources by 2030 and a requirement that all electricity generated be “zero-emissions” by 2040. I have to say I don’t think the schedules match.

The DPS final slide addresses outstanding issues.  On one hand existing sources of generation are being forced to retire while on the other hand electrification initiatives are increasing loads.  Grisaru claimed that at the PSC “We all agree reliability is the most important thing we have to worry about”.

NYISO Presentation

NYISO Director of System Planning Yachi Lin talked about their plans to implement a clean and reliable grid.  The following slide describes the NYISO planning process.  There is a two-year cycle of reliability planning that includes quarterly checks on the status of the system.  NYISO is constantly evaluating future reliability needs.

The following slide describes the generation system and the investments expected to be needed.  Existing generating capacity is 37.4 GW, but an additional 20 GW must be in service in seven years to meet the 2030 goal.  The unanswered question was whether this is feasible. Note that the feasibility question has been studiously avoided by the state and the NYISO and utility companies have not overtly called the aspirational schedule out as impractical.

Lin explained that additional transmission is needed to meet the 2030 70% renewable energy goal.  There are different areas of the state that do not have adequate transmission capabilities to move the solar and wind power out without curtailments.  To address those needs the NYISO planning process is supporting “unprecedented expansion”.

One of the planning reports is the quarterly Short-Term Assessment of Reliability (STAR).   Anyone interested in the status of the New York electric system would do well to listen to Lin’s explanation. The following slide notes that last year’s second quarter report noted that there was a reliability deficit of 446 MW in the summer of 2025.  The deficit was projected because of planned  fossil unit deactivations.  In response, NYISO opened a solicitation for market solutions or regulatory solutions.  No feasible market solution was submitted so they had to go to Plan B.

To maintain reliability, NYISO had to resort to a regulatory solution.  They designated two peaking generation plants as reliability needs and postponed their retirement for two years.  The NY Department of Environmental Conservation “Peaker Rule” incorporates this provision and there is a potential for an additional two-year extension. If the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission project is delayed beyond 2026 the additional extension might be required.

The Comprehensive Reliability Planning (CRP) report incorporates changes associated with demand growth. In the following slide NYISO describes expected changes.  As mentioned previously, fossil generator retirements and growth in demand are primary expected changes to the system.  Part of the load demand shift changes the peak loads from summer to winter.  This is troublesome because the winter diurnal peak will occur when there is no solar.  She also mentioned the dual-fuel units.  Many New York generating units normally burn natural gas because it is cheaper but have the capability to switch to oil firing when natural gas is needed by residential consumers.  The increased reliance on these units, which at the same time are targeted for retirement is a problem.  The CRP analysis also identified added risks.  The addition of the Micron chip fab plant near Syracuse will add load equivalent to the total load of Vermont and New Hampshire.  The New York Power Authority operates small natural gas plants in New York City that are supposed to be phased out by December 2030 due to political pressure.  Lin had to make the obligatory gesture that climate changes to extreme weather was a risk.  Finally, the shift to a weather-dependent generating system means that reliability design criteria need to be revised to account for extreme weather conditions outside current planning horizons.

The next four slides summarize the challenges to meet the 2040 Climate Act mandate for a “zero-emissions” electric grid.  The next slide repeats the points raised in the previous slide.  Lin remarked that the year of the cross over from summer to winter peaking can only be guessed at this time.  Depending on the trends in load it could be almost any time in the next decade.  The 90/10 and 99/1 forecasts are probability estimates for the likelihood of extreme weather events.  The final bullet in the slide points out that there could be substantial load growth needed to provide reliability services.  The NYISO includes a high load policy case that incorporates this possibility.

The next slide lists the challenges on the generation side.  Lin makes the point that generation issues extend beyond simply evaluating the capacity needed to match the load projections.  Wind, solar, and energy storage are inverter-based resources that require ancillary service support to make the transmissions system reliable.  Weak-grid interconnection and common mode failures are issues that most people, including me, do not understand well.  (In the vein of better understanding of these issues I recommend the Practical Engineering video Connecting Solar to the Grid is Harder than You Think.) The key point is that all the people that I know who understand these issues are worried but there has not been any wavering of the official political position that all is well.  Consequently, the Scoping Plan outline produced by the Hochul Administration to guide the energy transition is incomplete.  Lin makes the little recognized point that the Dispatchable Emissions Free Resources are not needed just for the long periods of low renewable resource availability but also to provide these ancillary services.

The next slide addresses DEFR specifically. I will not discuss this much because I already covered the Department of Public Service (DPS) two-day technical conference last December that focused on characterization of the potential “gap” caused by low renewable energy resource availability over long periods of time.  I mentioned but did not emphasize the importance of providing the “reliability attributes of retired synchronous generation”.

The focus of this webinar was on the transmission challenges as covered in the following slide.  Lin explained that transmission expansion is required to get the diffuse wind and solar energy from where it is collected to where it is needed.  The existing system is not adequate for this task.

enormous amount of work underway, but the analysts have a big challenge dealing with changes in the development of resources.  As noted earlier, the 2026 expectation is that the Champlain Hudson Power Express project will be online.  Even after years of development work the right of way is still not fully permitted and there are numerous examples of supply chain issues delaying other projects, so this may not occur.  Clearly longer-term planning is subject to massive uncertainty.

National Grid Presentation

Brad Franey Vice President Clean Energy Development explained how National Grid addressed the need for transmission support.  As he points out the utilities receive funding for their transmission and distribution (T&D) system investments from rate cases.  Those rate cases are, in no small part, influenced by politics.    As a result, New York’s utility companies are held hostage and are not going to overtly challenge the political narrative that the Climate Act objectives can be achieved on schedules mandated by the law.  The following slide probably went through multiple iterations to achieve a description of plans that checks all the boxes for what the company thinks that the politicians want to hear. 

In the remainder of his presentation, he described specific projects that the utility is doing in its service territory.  If you are interested in that information, check out my blog post that covers all the slides.

Questions and Answers

The question and answer portion of the webinar was interesting.   The first question asked was “Is reliability a prerequisite for everything else or is it co-equal with our policy objectives?”  I have heard suggestions from climate activists that policy objectives should be considered more than they are currently but anyone hoping to hear that there have been changes to protections in place to make sure that those policies don’t get ahead of reliability would have been disappointed in the answers.  Elizabeth Grisaru from the DPS made it clear that reliability comes first, that there are “off ramps” for the implementation schedule, and that the PSC will not let the zeal for meeting de-carbonization goals get out in front of reliability.  Yachi Lin from the NYISO emphasized the point that they are constantly evaluating reliability.  The quarterly short term assessment of reliability and the longer term reliability needs assessment both address it.  She admitted that we are going to have outages because the network is not built to be 100% risk-free or outage free.  The alternative it “gold plating the system” which we cannot afford. 

There was a question about longer planning processes planning and deployment timing. Liu explained that the NYISO resource adequacy process identifies risk factors and the timelines to develop the responses.  Franey explained that the building component is the fastest but still takes years.  The process has to determine what is needed and where before the planning permitting, and construction plans can be developed.  Only when all that is done can construction begin but there are potential delays due to procurement and supply chain issues that also must be addressed. 

Discussion

My impression of the speakers at this meeting is that they were desperately trying to make the point that the transmission challenges for the Climate Act mandates and schedule were impossible goals without actually saying that.  I believe that all the technical people who really understand the electric grid in the DPS, NYISO and the electric companies are being held hostage to the political narrative that “All is well”.  That did not work out for Kevin Bacon in Animal House and it won’t work out here either.

This overview of the transmission challenges for an electric grid that relies on renewable energy is a useful overview for any jurisdiction thinking about the transition away from fossil fuels.  While it may not be necessary to develop and deploy a not yet commercially available technology like the generation sector to make this all work there still are inverter-based resource integration issues that need to be resolved. 

In my opinion the bigger problem is the scale of the transmission upgrades and additions needed.  New York has already committed $6 billion to start “unbottling” renewable resources which is code in New York for Upstate utilities paying for support for New York City access to renewables.  New York also has plans for three major bulk transmission projects to get hydroelectric power from Quebec, another to collect the energy from part of Upstate to New York City, and the third to start the process of connecting the expected 9 GW of offshore wind into the grid.  Nobody has admitted to the total costs.

The other New York problem that I suspect is common elsewhere is that the politicians who enacted these net-zero laws were more concerned with the optics of aspirational timelines and not the feasibility of those schedules.  A question about longer planning processes planning and deployment timing made the point that the NYISO resource adequacy process that identifies specific need for transmission development, the New York’s de-regulated market process to propose, bid, and choose the development, and the project planning, permitting, and construction plan development which all need to  be completed before construction can begin takes a lot of time.  Reading between the lines all the speakers are highly skeptical that the artificial deadlines of the Climate Act can be achieved.

One final point not addressed in the webinar but certainly affecting the viability of New York’s energy transition goal is the decarbonization of heating and transportation.  That is going to require a complete rewiring of the distribution network.

Conclusion

Francis Menton’s recent article on the Green Energy Wall concluded that something has to give with these energy transition policies.  The magnitude, costs, and technical challenges of the generation and transmission electric grid transition ensure that that there is no question that New York will hit that wall.  The only question is when New York’s crash dummies will hit it.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.

It was raining this morning when I setoff on my morning jog around Green Lake just to the south of downtown Settle in the northwest of the United States.  Because it was raining, I didn’t take my iPhone, so I don’t have a photograph of the woman who was swimming in this large duckpond.   When I got home, I checked the lakemonster.com website, and it says the surface water temperature was just 59°F, which is 15°C.

I have only been here a week, and it is the first time I have seen someone swimming in Green Lake.  She wasn’t wearing a wetsuit – just a swimsuit, goggles and a bathing cap.

She cut a lonely figure, moving slowly across the surface with an even paced freestyle, attached to her waist was a bright orange floatation device.

Then she stopped, at the platform with the diving boards, described on the websites as the raft across from the brick theatre originally build in 1928 as a bathhouse.

Holding on to one of the rails along the front of the platform, she checked her watch – and I began to applaud loudly from the shore, from in front of the theatre.   She looked across the water to me and called out, ‘Thank you,’ in a very Seattle accent.

I could see then that she was about my age – an older white woman.  Then she put her goggles back in place and lowered her head into that very cold body of water and started swimming again, slowly, one arm over, then the other.  I kept applauding.

I thought the applauding might warm my hands, if nothing else.  The air temperature was just 51°F, which is 11°C that is quite cold – at least for me, born in northern Australia where it never gets this cold.

I was only wearing a thin sweatshirt and track pants, both already wet from the rain. I was most of the way around the lake that has a circumference of 4.6 kms, that is nearly three miles.

I have decided I want to acclimatise to this cold climate.

It is what I try and do wherever I go these last few years: to be adaptable.

‘Do as the Romans when in Rome’ is what one used to say.

Though I have noticed that most everyone else moving around the perimeter of this lake this morning – this lake come duckpond – this morning is wearing raincoats over jumpers.  Then there is the older woman in the water.

I have been thinking about getting in the water and going for a swim, myself.   My daughter, whom I am staying with in an apartment nearby, has been concerned about water quality with all the duck and goose poop, and we did see a rotting fish in the shallows the other day.  My daughter, she has said that she will not be getting in with me.

I’ve checked levels of cyanobacteria (blue green algae) that can produce harmful neurotoxins: they are within acceptable limits in Green Lake, at the moment.   I have been searching for whatever data I can find.

Everything I have read on the internet in the last week about swimming in Green Lake, suggests the biggest issue will be the water temperature.   That the water is currently too cold for most of us.  That the water won’t make us sick, if only we can survive the freezing.

There is a sign near the bathhouse that says, ‘Early Season at Madrona and East Green Lake begins Memorial Day weekend’ and ‘Summer Season at all nine locations begins late June’.   Today is Saturday, May 18^th.   Memorial Day is observed on the last Monday of May, which will be in 10 days – not quite yet.

I have also been reading up on the history of Green Lake that once drained into Puget Sound that empties into the northwest Pacific Ocean.

Despite all the rhetoric about global warming I can’t find any information to suggest that the swim season, for example, here at Green Lake, that it is getting earlier, because it is that much warmer.  Warmer, at least relative to how it used to be when there was less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But surely this follows logically? If we now have global boiling.   Surely, we can start swimming on the first day of spring that was a while ago – I wish.

While water temperature is purportedly the limiting factor when it comes to swimming now in Green Lake, and while we are told it is now that much hotter than it ever was, it appears there are fewer people swimming, than when the bathhouse was built in 1928.   According to the history books, the first year the bathhouse was in operation – providing somewhere for swimmers to get changed and safely leave their belongings – at least 53,000 people swam in Green Lake as measured by the number of people who used the bathhouse that year.

The old photographs show crowded beaches, even synchronised swimming as a performance that could be watched from the community centre that is around the other side of the lake.

There are two swimming areas at Green Lake, but only one, West Green Lake, was opened for swimming last season, during the 2023 summer.   There was apparently only a need for one swimming area, and a shortage of lifeguards.  Apparently, that is the other limiting factor: not only is the water is too cold for most of the year but when it is warm enough there are not enough lifeguards to open both beaches.

The population of Seattle has grown somewhat since 1928, and the climate is apparently warmer now, yet there are perhaps fewer people swimming and apparently fewer people who want to be lifeguards.

I would argue that this reflects our growing disconnect with nature, not just here in Seattle but across The West.

I would argue that as a civilisation we purport to care more and more about the natural environment, but I am inclined to think that most people are less inclined to immerse themselves in it – by which I mean nature, even cold water.

This is a pity, because there is something very cathartic about just being in nature, even if it is a rather cold duckpond, that was once a marsh – that is now Green Lake not too far from downtown Seattle.

 

To be continued.

Essay by Eric Worrall

The diesel generator would only be needed for “backup”.

How the South Pole research station could run on 100% renewable energy

Joshua S Hill
May 15, 2024

American researchers have completed an analysis that demonstrates how renewable energy could almost completely replace diesel at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, resulting in millions of dollars in savings.

The analysis, published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, was conducted by scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), some of whom have worked at the South Pole and wanted to understand if renewables could replace the use of diesel.

“All of the energy at the South Pole currently is generated by diesel fuel and a generator,” said Amy Bender, a physicist in Argonne’s High Energy Physics division, a corresponding author on the paper, and a scientist who has spent time working at the South Pole.

​“We were asking if it is possible to transition to renewables. This study is the beginning of trying to make that case.”

…

Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/how-the-south-pole-research-station-could-run-on-100-renewable-energy/

The abstract of the study;

Techno-economic analysis of renewable energy generation at the South Pole

Author links open overlay panelSusan Babinec ^a, Ian Baring-Gould ^b, Amy N. Bender ^a, Nate Blair ^b, Xiangkun Li ^b, Ralph T. Muehleisen ^a, Dan Olis ^b, Silvana Ovaitt ^b

^a Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Lemont, 60439, IL, USA
^b National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 15013 Denver West Parkway, Golden, 80401, CO, USA

Highlights

• •Renewable energy generation at the South Pole, Antarctica is explored.
• •South Pole conditions require unique renewable technical design.
• •South Pole renewable system possible with mature, commercially-available technology.
• •Least-cost hybrid renewable system reduces annual diesel consumption by 95%.
• •South Pole renewable energy creates positive economic impact across many scenarios.

Abstract

Transitioning from fossil-fuel power generation to renewable energy generation and energy storage in remote locations has the potential to reduce both carbon emissions and cost. This study presents a techno-economic analysis for implementation of a hybrid renewable energy system at the South Pole in Antarctica, which currently hosts several high-energy physics experiments with nontrivial power needs. A tailored model of resource availability and economics for solar photovoltaics, wind turbine generators, lithium-ion energy storage, and long-duration energy storage at this site is explored in different combinations with and without existing diesel energy generation. The Renewable Energy Integration and Optimization (REopt) platform is used to determine the optimal system component sizing and the associated system economics and environmental benefit. We find that the least-cost system includes all three energy generation sources and lithium-ion energy storage. For an example steady-state load of 170 kW, this hybrid system includes 180 kW-DC of photovoltaic panels, 570 kW of wind turbines, and a 3.4 MWh lithium-ion battery energy storage system. This system reduces diesel consumption by 95% compared to an all-diesel configuration, resulting in approximately 1200 metric tons of carbon footprint avoided annually. Over the course of a 15-year analysis period the reduced diesel usage leads to a net savings of 57 million United States dollars, with a time to payback of approximately two years. All the scenarios modeled show that the transition to renewables is highly cost effective under the unique economics and constraints of this extremely remote site.

Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032123011322

I admire their optimism.

Perhaps they should try powering a small part of the installation with a small number of wind turbines and solar panels, before they commit the entire facility to weather dependent energy sources.

I guess if all else fails, they could always burn the lithium battery for warmth.