Llewellyn King: Utilities face more demand, less generation

How New England's energy mix has changed since 2000 -- before the closure of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, on the coastline in Plymouth, Mass., which was shut in 2019.

— — Courtesy of ISO New England

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, with the Manomet Hills behind.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

America’s electric utilities are facing revolutionary changes as big as any they have faced since Thomas Edison got the whole thing going in 1882.

Between now and 2050 – just 28 years -- practically everything must change: The goal is to reach net zero, the stage at which the utilities stop putting greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. 

But in that same timeframe, the demand for electricity is expected to at least double and, according to some surveys, to exceed doubling as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles and as other industries, such as cement and steel manufacturing, along with general manufacturing, go electric. 

Just eliminating fossil fuel alone is a tall order -- 22 percent of the current generating mix is coal, and 38 percent is natural gas. Half of the generation will, in theory, go offline while demand for electricity soars. 

The industry is resolutely struggling with this dilemma while a few, sotto voce, wonder how it can be achieved. 

True, there are some exciting technological options coming along: hydrogen, ocean currents, small modular nuclear reactors, so-called long-drawdown batteries, and carbon capture, storage and utilization. The question is whether any of these will be ready to be deployed on a scale that will make a difference by the target date of 2050. 

There are other schemes -- still just schemes -- to use the new electrified transportation fleets as a giant national battery. The idea is that your electric vehicle will be charged at night, or at other times when there is an abundance of power, and that you will sell the power back to the utility for the evening peak, when we all fire up our homes and electricity demand zooms. 

This is just an idea and no structure for this partnership between consumer and utility exists, nor is there any idea of how the customer will be compensated for helping the utility in its hours of need. It is hard to see how there will be enough money in the transaction to cause people to want to help the utility because besides the cost of charging their vehicles, the batteries will deteriorate faster. 

The ongoing digitization of utilities means that they will be able to better manage their flows and to practice more of what is called distributed energy resources (DER), which can include such things as interrupting certain nonessential users by agreement. 

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, bordering Dallas, says that DER will save him as much as 10 percent of Rayburn’s output, but not enough to take care of the escalating demand.  

Like many utilities, Rayburn is bracing for the future, expecting to burn more natural gas and add solar as fast as possible. They are also upgrading their lines, called connectors, to carry more electricity. 

The latter highlights another major challenge for utilities: transmission.

The West generates plenty of renewable power electricity during the day, some of which goes to waste because it is available when it isn’t needed in the region, but when it would be a boon in the East.  

The simple solution is to build more long-distance transmission. Forget about it. To get the many state and local authorizations and to overcome the not-in-my-backyard crowd, most judge, wouldn’t be possible. 

Instead, utilities are looking to buttress the grid and move power over a stronger grid. In fact, there isn’t one grid but three: Eastern, Western and the anomalous Texas grid, ERCOT, which is confined to that state and, by design, poorly connected to the other two, although that may change. 

Advocates of this strengthening of the grid abound. The federal government is on board with major funding. Shorter new lines between strong and weak spots would go a long way to making the movement of electricity across the nation easier. They would also move the nation nearer to a truly national grid. But even building short electric connections of a few hundred miles is a fraught business. 

The task of the utilities -- there are just over 3,000 of them, mostly small -- is going to be to change totally while retooling without shutting off the power. The car companies are totally changing, too. But they can shut down to retool. Not so the utilities. Theirs must be revolution without disruption: the light that doesn’t fail.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Chris Powell: Time to stock up on antivenin; paying for utility deadbeats; coping cops

Don’t pet: Timber rattlesnake.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Another protected species made news in Connecticut other week when a venomous timber rattlesnake attacked two dogs in their yard in Glastonbury. Their owner rushed the dogs to the Pieper Veterinary clinic, in Middletown, just in time for them to be saved with snakebite antidote, what is called antivenin. The dog owner is lucky he wasn't bitten, too.

Connecticut once treated rattlesnakes as the dangerous nuisances they are. They were widespread and it was open season on them. But now that their habitat is limited to the northwest corner of the state and Glastonbury, East Hampton, Marlborough and Portland, state government has made killing them illegal, as if Connecticut couldn't live without them.

State law feels the same way about bears and bobcats, other predators that attack domestic animals.

As a result the habitat of the predators is expanding. While zoning often is used by suburban and rural towns to exclude housing that might be inhabited by unrich people, it is considered environmentally sound and high-minded to expand the habitat of the predatory animals.

The predators even have their own lobby at the state Capitol, environmental extremists who frighten the state's timid legislators more than the predators themselves do.

So Connecticut residents should ask their legislators how many more rattlesnakes, bears, and bobcats state government plans to accommodate, and hospitals and veterinary clinics should stock up on antivenin.

xxx

Hospital and medical insurance bills are not the only places where state government has been hiding social-welfare costs from taxpayers. Such costs long have been hidden in electric and gas utility bills as well.

The Connecticut Examiner's Brendan Crowley reports that 25,000 utility users haven't been paying their bills for many months, some since as far back as October 2019, on account of state government's seasonal restrictions on disconnection and the disconnection moratorium imposed on electric and gas utilities when the virus epidemic started.

Eversource says it is carrying $171 million in bills overdue for 60 days or more. The company and United Illuminating have asked the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to let them start disconnecting delinquents in September.

Eventually the expense of the unpaid bills is transferred to paying customers through higher rates.

Why should paying customers particularly have to pay the electricity and gas bills of customers who don't pay? For the same reason paying customers of hospitals and medical insurers are forced to pay for people who don't pay for their own treatment in Connecticut's hospitals. This is done because transferring social welfare costs out of state government through intermediaries lets state government escape political responsibility for them. So hospitals, medical insurers, and utility companies are wrongly blamed for price increases caused by government.

This doesn't mean that state government shouldn't assist with medical and utility costs for the indigent. It means that state government should cover those costs directly and honestly, through regular and general taxes.

But honesty would show that the cost of state government is far higher than people think, increasing the public's desire for efficiency in government and jeopardizing government's many less compelling expenses.

xxx

Police in New Haven in June were disgraced by their callous treatment of a man who had seemed drunk when arrested on a complaint that he was brandishing a gun at a block party. He was handcuffed and put in a van without seatbelts. Video showed his head smashing into the wall of the van when it stopped abruptly. More video showed him being dragged out of the van at headquarters when officers didn't believe his claim to be injured. At last report he was paralyzed.

But this month police video showed three New Haven officers hastening to rescue a young woman about to jump from the roof of a parking garage. The officers functioned not only as saviors but also as social workers.

The country is going nuts all around the police, so as tired of it and flawed as they may be, it's a wonder that they cope with it as well as they do.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.)

Llewellyn King: Utilities urgently need to add transmission

In Seekonk, Mass., during the height of the Jan. 29 blizzard. Many people in southeastern Massachusetts lost power in the storm, in which winds gusted to hurricane force.

Logo of Independent System Operator, which oversees the region’s electric grid.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

It has become second nature. You hear that bad weather is coming and rush to the store to stock up on bottled water and canned and other non-perishable foods. You check your flashlight batteries.

For a few days, we are all survivalists. Why? Because we are resigned to the idea that bad weather equates with a loss of electrical power.

What happens is the fortunate have emergency generators hooked up to their freestanding houses. The rest of us just hope for the best, but with real fear of days without heat.

It happened most severely in Texas in February 2021; during Winter Storm Uri, which lasted five days, 250 people died. Recently, during the Blizzard of 2022, on Jan. 28-29, 100,000 people in Massachusetts endured bitter cold nights when the electricity failed. There were more power failures in the most recent ice storm.

There are 3,000 electric utilities in the United States. Sixty large ones, like Consolidated Edison, NextEra Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, supply 70 percent of the nation’s electricity. Nonetheless, the rest are critical in their communities.

All utilities, large and small, have much in common: They are all under pressure to replace coal and natural gas generation with renewables, which means solar and wind. No new, big hydro is planned, and nuclear is losing market share as plants go out of service because they are too expensive to operate.

The word the utilities like to use is resilience. It means that they will do their best to keep the lights on and to restore power as fast as possible if they fail due to bad weather. When those events threaten, the utilities spring into action, dispatching crews to each other’s trouble spots as though they were ordering up the cavalry. The utilities have become very proactive, but if storms are severe, it often isn’t enough.

Now, besides more frequent severe weather events, utilities face the possibility of destabilization on another front, due to switching to renewables before new storage and battery technology is available or deployed.

The first step to avoid new instability -- and it is a critical one -- is to add transmission. This would move electricity from where it is generated in wind corridors and sun-drenched states to where the demand is, often in a different time zone.

Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which serves four states in the West from its base in Westminster, Colo., says new west-east and east-west transmission is critical to take the power from the resource-rich Intermountain states to the population centers in the East and to California.

“Most existing transmission lines run north to south. They aren’t getting the renewables to the load centers,” Highley says.

Echoing this theme, Alice Moy-Gonzalez, senior vice president of strategic development at Anterix, a communications company providing broadband private networks that make the grid more secure and efficient, sees pressure on the grid from renewables and from new customer demands (such as electrical vehicles) as electrification spreads throughout society.

“The use of advanced secure communications to monitor all of these resources and coordinate their operation will be key to maintaining reliability and optimization as we modernize the grid,” Moy-Gonzalez says.

Better communications are one step in the way forward, but new lines are at the heart of the solution.

The Biden administration, as part of its infrastructure plan, has singled out the grid for special attention under the rubric “Build a Better Grid.” It has also earmarked $20 billion of already appropriated funds to get the ball rolling.

Industry lobbyists in Washington say they have the outlines of the Department of Energy plan, but details are slow to emerge. Considered particularly critical is the administration’s commitment to ease and coordinate siting obstacles with the states and affected communities.

Utilities are challenged to increase the resilience of the grid they have and to expand it before it becomes more unstable.

Clint Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, says, “We aren’t going to reach the growth in renewables needed to address climate without exponential growth in major interstate transmission. And sadly, we won’t succeed with that goal on our current trajectory. We will need significant federal intervention because collaboration among the states simply hasn’t been working within the timeframe needed.”

Better keep the flashlights handy.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington., D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

Website: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Resilience is the key word now as utilities face increasing stresses

Regional transmission organizations in the continental U.S.

— Graphic by BlckAssn 

WEST WARWICK

We all know that sinking feeling when the lights flicker and go out. If bad weather has been forecast, the utility has probably sent you advance warning that there could be outages. You should have a flashlight or two handy, fuel the car, charge your cell phone and other electronic devices, take a shower, and fill all the containers you can with water. If it is winter, put extra blankets on beds and pray that the power stays on.

Disaster struck mid-February in Texas. Uri, a freak and deadly winter storm, froze the state’s power grid. It lasted an unusually long time: five terrible days.

There was chaos in Texas, including more than 150 deaths. The suffering was severe. Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of San Antonio-based CPS Energy, told a recent United States Energy Association (USEA) press briefing on resilience that the deep freeze was an equal opportunity disabler: Every generating source was affected. “There were no villains,” she said.

Uri wasn’t just a Texas tragedy, but also a sharp warning to the electric utility industry across the country to look to their preparedness, and to take steps to mitigate damage from cyberattacks and aberrant, extreme weather.

This is known as resilience. It is the North Star of gas and electric utility companies. They all have resilience as their goal.

But it is an elusive one, hard to quantify and one that is, by its nature, always a moving target.

This industry-wide struggle to improve resilience comes at a time when three forces are colliding, all of them impacting the electric utilities: more extreme weather; sophisticated, malicious cyberattacks; and new demands for electricity.

On the latter rests the future of smart cities, electrified transportation, autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and even electric air taxis. The coming automation of everything -- from robotic hospital beds to data mining -- assumes a steady and uninterrupted supply of electricity.

The modern world is electric and modern cataclysm is electric failure.

Richard Mroz, a past president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, who had to deal with the havoc of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, said at the USEA press briefing, “All our expectations about our critical infrastructure, particularly our electric grid, have increased over time. We expect much more of it.”

Gold-Williams said extreme cold and extreme heat, as in Texas this year, put special pressures on the system. She said the future is a partnership with customers, and that they must understand that there are costs associated with upgrading the system and improving resilience. Currently, CPS Energy is implementing post-Uri changes, she said.

Joseph Fiksel, professor emeritus of systems engineering at Ohio State University, said at the USEA briefing that the U.S. electric system “performs at an extraordinary level of capacity” compared to other parts of the world. He said utilities must rethink how they design their systems to recognize the huge number of calamities around the world that have affected the industry.

A keen observer of the electric utility world, Morgan O’Brien, executive chairman of Anterix, a company that is helping utilities move to private broadband networks, believes communications are the vital link. He told me, “Resilience for utilities is the time in which and the means by which service is restored after ‘bad things’ happen, be they weather events of malicious meddling. Low-cost and ubiquitous sensors connected by wireless broadband technologies, are the instruments of resiliency for the modern grid. No network is so robust that failure is impossible, but a network enabled by broadband conductivity uses technology to measure the occurrence of damage and to speed the restoration of service.”

Neighborhood microgrids, fast and durable communications, diversity of generation, undergrounding critical lines, storage and cyber alertness are part of the resilience-seeking future.

As more is asked of electricity, resilience becomes a byword for keeping the fabric of the modern world intact. Or at least repairing it fast when it tears.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington,D.C.

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Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com

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Llewellyn King: The long road to reducing fires sparked by utilities

California is burning. It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be tomorrow. The price in human life is enormous – in animal and plant life, too. The price in human suffering is gigantic, and the price in property damage is incalculable.

Even while unprecedented high Santa Ana winds are blowing devastation, electric utilities are looking for fixes that accord with the new realities brought about by global warming. Worse is yet to come, they fear.

In January the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based trade association, assembled a task force of electric utility CEOs to find solutions. The choices before them are not appealing.

The problem is California may be in the vanguard of fire-prone states, but it is not alone. Many states with heavy forest cover and long electric lines have reason to look to the future with apprehension. What amounts to a perfect fire storm in California could happen in states from Illinois to Louisiana, and from Virginia to Oregon.

Here are the options facing the electric utility CEOs:

Vegetation control. This is essential, as Rod Kuckro, a reporter for E&E News, points out. But vegetation control – simply cutting down trees near electric lines -- is easier said than done. Kuckro, an astute utilities journalist, says that Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), the utility that has borne the brunt of the blame and whose northern California service area is ground zero for fire, has 125,000 miles of power lines. These are threatened by millions of dead trees, plus the normal threat to power lines from falling trees, dead or alive.

Kuckro says the vegetation issue is complicated by a severe lack of manpower skilled in tree management. Trees must be cut and removed, or they will become fresh fuel for fires.

Surveillance technology. Long-term technology is going to be decisive. Utilities will need a great deal more real-time data about their lines. Line surveillance, always a utility priority, is becoming job number one, and they are looking to the digital frontier. 

Surveillance by men on foot and horse gave way to men and women in helicopters and all-terrain vehicles. Now comes the age of drones and data.

Morgan O’Brien, CEO of Anterix, which offers secure broadband communications to utilities, says with broadband technology and judiciously placed sensors, “a utility control room could know about a falling line in 1.4 seconds.” Time enough to cut off the power and start a repair crew on its way.

But this kind of data solution will take time and, like all the solutions, money. This will be difficult for PG&E, which is already in bankruptcy because of fire claims from last year, and the year before.

Undergrounding. This sounds so reasonable, so logical. But in most places, it is not an option and not in earthquake-prone California. The cost of burying lines, where they can safely be buried on the PG&E system, is estimated to be as much as $3 million a mile for residential lines to $80 million a mile for high-voltage cables. It would take decades to bury even a few of its lines. And the cost is almost beyond contemplation.

Microgrids. These are often mentioned. These are autonomous entities usually serving a paper mill, a university, a shopping center or sometimes a whole community. Microgrids self-generate, mostly with gas or solar, and sell surplus power to the utilities; and, in some cases, they act as storage systems for their host utility. Their advantage in a fire-prone region is that they can be isolated from their host grid. Therefore, the lights stay on if the big grid is shut down prophylactically, explains Mike Byrnes, senior vice president of Veolia North America, an energy and environmental services company.

Recently Jacqueline Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy, told me that cybersecurity concerns keep her up at night. For many utility managers that threat is now joined by an existential threat from one of man’s oldest enemies: fire.

If you are the manager of a utility in a blue state, you might also worry whether the federal government will help in a fire disaster. To date, President Trump has let California burn: no federal declaration of a disaster and, accordingly, no federal disaster relief, no troops. Hell, not even a presidential flyover for beleaguered California.

This is not benign neglect. This is vengeful neglect. Remember Puerto Rico?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

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Llewellyn King: Utilities struggle to maintain revenues amidst new energy technology

Howard Hughes, a pioneer in movie making and aviation (which informed his cantilevered underwire bra design for actress Jane Russell), was blindsided by disruptive technology. Electric utilities might want to heed Hughes’s history as they deal with future shock.

Hughes believed that his 1930 silent movie Hell’s Angels-- which has some of the finest flying sequences ever shot -- could make it even as the age of talkies was dawning. But he was in error; he had remake the movie with a sound track at huge expense.

Something similar happened to Hughes with the H-4 Hercules, the giant, wooden flying boat -- nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” by the press -- which he built during World War II. Eight reciprocating engines were no match for the potential offered on the horizon by jet engines. And spruce was no match for the superior aluminum alloys that had been developed during the war.

Leaders in the electric utility industry know full well that times are changing. But are they making brilliant silent movies when the talkies are around the corner, so to speak?

Dealing with change is especially hard for utilities because they are in a real-time business. The juice must flow 24-7, which means that the new has to integrate seamlessly with the old. Shutting down to retool, as Hughes did with Hell's Angels, is not an option.

Yet in the 46 years that I've been writing about the utility industry, I've never seen such upheaval, ergo such challenges. There is no aspect of the industry which isn't beset by technology at the gate: computing and artificial intelligence; drones for line surveillance and security; 3D printing (additive manufacturing) for repairs; superior data from smart meters; and aggressive growth from competitors on the roof – in the form of solar panels -- and in the marketplace.

But, to my mind, the most-daunting challenge facing the industry is flat or declining electric demand. For investor-owned utilities, which provide 80 percent of the nation’s electricity, this challenge, this reality has been masked by the good performance of their stocks on Wall Street, which owes a lot to low interest rates and volatility in the market, not to the long-term prospects for investor-owned companies. For now, it is the utility paradox.

The industry, through the Edison Electric Institute, has built a superb lobbying arm that can seek legislative remedies for its troubles -- as it did when dividends were under attack. But there are no legislative fixes for an industry in market turmoil, abetted by technological disruption.

There is more hope for relief from regulators. Increasingly, the industry is focused on state commissions: it wants relief from the downside of rooftop solar; relief from intrusive and misleading marketers of solar products; and, above all, protection of the grid's existing infrastructure.

Additionally, not all technology is disruptive. Utility solar farms are an economic and technological success. Storage is attracting innovators and may yet get a breakthrough. There is the hope that new load may come through electric vehicles -- although growth there could be stunted by cheap oil. It behooves the industry to push for better recharging, particularly inductive charging, and to advertise more electric consumption as a remedy for air pollution from the automobile tailpipe.

In 1974, I worked with the then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the late Dixy Lee Ray, on an energy study for President Richard Nixon. The study advocated more electrification of transportation – and we had railroads in mind first and foremost. The United States has a few miles of electrified railway in the Midwest and the Amtrak corridor from Washington to Boston – far less electrified railway than other developed countries.

The railroads got away from the electric utilities, and they won't be corralled now. But there is a powerful environmental and social case for electrifying cars; creating a moral imperative to drive electric, if refueling is solved -- and I don't mean hanging an extension cord out the kitchen window. South Korea has buses that refuel through induction-charging plates at bus stops; smaller batteries, frequent charging.

It will be a lot easier for utilities to argue for regulatory relief to protect their social and shareholder responsibilities if they are extending their social value. 

Llewellyn King, host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor columnist and international business consultant.

This originated at Inside Sources.