hello and welcome to the first ever pop-up Forum hosted by the Massachusetts executive office of energy and environmental Affairs or eea my name is Jason Marshall and I'm the deputy secretary for federal and Regional energy Affairs at EA first you might be wondering why we're calling this a pop-up forum well you might have encountered a pop-up Forum at a store or an event at some point in your travels and like those pop-ups we see these forums as unanticipated one-time events they're really a vehicle for providing information about an emerging or timely New England energy issue and in this way they're more spontaneous than a regular conference or event and they're closer in time from announcement to the Daily event for this forum our first one we're focusing on grid enhancing Technologies or gets as they're commonly called gets our prime example of the promise of innovation and moving us to a modern clean energy grid there are tools to get more out of the transmission system both our current infrastructure and when new construction is needed be warned like much in the energy space this is a highly technical area but we're very fortunate to have with us experts on our panel who are going to help us sort through it and if guets are new to you hopefully this session provides a starting point to build on so we're going to begin today with a technical background on grid enhancing Technologies or again gets as I said and then we'll move to our panel on the regulatory landscape forgets we'll then shift to strategies and approaches for integrating gets in New England and we'll finish up with some questions and answers so hopefully some of you have some questions out there and we'll be enabling the Q a feature when we get to that point in our program um but first we're I'm pleased to welcome our Secretary of Energy environmental Affairs Rebecca Tepper to join us for a few minutes and secretary Tepper thanks for being here today thanks for having me thank you everyone for joining us for this pop-up uh Forum I'm excited to launch this with Weezy and Jason and they've done a great job coming up with a topic first topic today of grid enhancing Technologies you know as you all know we in Massachusetts like so many other states are trying to Electrify and decarbonize and as we do that we want to make sure that building Isn't Our First Choice building new we hope that our first choice is using what we already have efficiently and I know that that's what you're going to talk about today and they're a prime example of how Innovation is going to allow us to save money while we're also providing more reliability and um and and hopefully at a at a uh less costly um so as we all know uh it looks like ferk's about ready to issue an order on interconnection and uh hoping that we'll see this as part of it um I think we will um and we're hoping that we'll be able to get this used more in ISO New England and throughout the country uh because we really want to make sure that when we are thinking about how we move forward we're thinking about environmental justice communities and how we can make sure that they are not paying more than they should for this transition so really looking forward to hearing from the panelists and I will turn it back thank you secretary thanks for being here I'm gonna kick it over to my colleague assistant secretary Noir to introduce herself the panel and start with panel one great thank you Jason much appreciated and thank you secretary Tepper for those uh welcoming remarks as well my name is Wheezy noira I am the assistant secretary for federal and Regional energy Affairs at the Massachusetts executive office of energy and environmental Affairs and I am thrilled to be here uh this afternoon thank you all for joining us I would like to introduce our panel all of our panelists before we jump into panel one the technical background on get so if all of our panelists could come online um very briefly I will have each of them introduce um herself or himself quickly and then we will move right into panel one so David how about you kick it off sure hi my name is Dave choir I work for PPL I'm responsible for the transmission systems in Rhode Island as well as Pennsylvania it's nice to be here thanks David Brent how about you I am Brent Oberlin director of transmission planning generally responsible for long-term reliability assessments of the New England system great thank you Brent and Julia hi everyone I'm Julia selker I'm the executive director of the watt Coalition and we're the trade Association representing grid enhancing Technologies and other companies who are interested in seeing gets deployed widely across the United States thank you thank you Julia Bruce uh good morning good afternoon everybody my name is Bruce suchita I work at the breto group it's a consultancy and I've done a lot of logarith enhancing technology related studies and presentations in the past I thank you for inviting me to this panel thank you Bruce Katie hello I'm Katie signer I'm a manager on the clean competitive grades team within our carbon free electricity practice at RMI and have been working on Market reforms and RTO processes that might need to evolve to accommodate the changing resource mix we're seeing for the past few years now thank you Katie and Tehran hi everyone thank you pleasure to be here my name is Tyrone Hill I'm director of clean energy development here at National Grid really helping to push forward a clean energy on future for all of us thank you great thank you all so much we really appreciate you all being here today as experts in the field and I will ask that Bruce David and Brent stay on camera so they will be our panelists for panel number one a technical background on grid enhancing Technologies and we'll go ahead and get started so I'll turn it over to Bruce to provide a high level overview of Technologies with a focus on Dynamic line ratings Advanced power flow control and topology optimization take it away Bruce
and Bruce quick reminder that you are on mute still
there you go um is the screen looking fine for everybody it is Bruce okay thank you so uh what I'll do here is discuss what at a general high level uh overview what good enhancing Technologies are and uh that's only to set the tone of the discussion for today um uh let me start with what good and as the Technologies are there are it's a definition that's not well defined and in this uh session today we're gonna assume it's topology optimization which is opening and closing circuits to reroute flows to avoid congestion or overloaded facilities Dynamic Library which everyone probably knows about it improves the thermal ratings used on the actual weather conditions so it allows uh power to more power to flow when it's colder or windier and there's a more of a cooling effect and there's an advanced powerful control which is um fast devices or small electronics devices that are used to flow or direct to full or powerful into one direction or another there are other technologies that potentially qualify as gets or gets bucketed into the gets uh batteries may be one of them events conductors maybe another one of them there's the the possibilities are endless but in order to get some discussion or at least not to deviate too much into the different Technologies for today's discussion we're going to assume that these three Technologies are the grid enhancing technologies that that the discussion will be focused on these Technologies can be installed quickly and cost effectively it actually helps maximize the capability of the existing uh transmission system they can provide temporarily or permanent Solutions depending on how you utilize them furthermore as they can be adequately they can also be removed quickly and they don't necessarily jeopardize the existing system so for example you can install grid enhancing Technologies to understand the conditions of the grid and leave it up to the operators whether you want to use that feature or not in a certain way it's like the GPS in your automobile you can use the GPS as a way to guide your driving you don't necessarily have to listen to the GPS all the GPS is telling you is making suggestions saying that if you go to the make a right at the next signal you can avoid transmission congestion or Road congestion so it's one of those Technologies the GPS when when it's uh obsolete you can throw it out if it breaks you can throw it out that's not going to help that's not going to do anything to your car if you need another one for your second car you can go to the market and buy for 100 or 200 and it will significantly improve the way that you drive your car but it is not replacing the car it does not replace the roads and it's just making the operational a lot easier so it can help in both the long-term and the short term it's these Technologies are actually complementary to building new transmission
so how do they complement new transmission um first off uh it can provide a bridge between today and when when the new permanent solution is available transmission planning typically takes three to five to ten years for planning uh in the meantime the grid is congested so if you can utilize these Technologies in in the interim term to avoid some of that congestion that's one way of using it and once the permanent solution is in place because these are portable Technologies you can move them away or you can keep them in place just for other purposes it will reduce the impact of transmission outages as well so the outages can happen in two ways one is the plan outages I understand that New England is uh utilizing some of the topology optimization um or or writing tests with the topology optimization trying to figure out how to reduce the congestion during outages that is sponsored by the mass CEC but uh it can also be when you're interconnecting the new line that you're building to the existing grid so how do you avoid congestion caused by that outage which can take several weeks uh when you're trying to interconnect new lines it can also smooth out the lumpiness of transmission investments just like generation Transmissions also on 1p investment uh the next upgrade for the transmission may actually provide you with too much of a capacity much more than you need so you can use a grid enhancing Technologies until the need actually justifies transmission it also helps uh increase the benefit to cost ratio of new new projects the transmission lines because what happens occasionally is that when you add new transmission and all of a sudden you realize that hey there's this new congestion on the underlying system that I didn't know it's like when you connect a new highway to a local Road the local Road made all the new congestion patterns you can use good enhancing Technologies to resolve those local congestions again until the next uh opportunity arises until you can replace that congestion with a permanent solution now the uh all this sounds very nice it also has financial implications too one is because these costs are low and you can have them incrementally compared to transmission the impact on rate is significantly smaller than building new transmission and it also Hedges against the um load projection in many cases more transmission is needed because you're looking at low growth or increasing load or different generation but there's always uncertainty associated with that so it's very hard for the utility to convince the regulator saying hey I need to invest another 10 million dollars in this line uh uh alternatively you can uh
have these great enhancing Technologies for a much lower cost and so there's the uh potential avoidance of risk of financial risks and also the system and Equipment risk going forward um that these Technologies can help now the benefits that we uh observe for good enhancing Technologies through the multiple tests or pilot projects are in the range of 100 million dollars or more depending on how widespread their um participated so I I show that here a few examples in a study for pjm uh production cost savings for a year and only in the real-time Market went over 100 million dollars uh Pacific Gas and Electric company's review of their system showed that 2 000 DSR dsrs are of flow control devices uh help help to mitigate uh thermal overloading of 230 KB line and that led to roughly a 75 cost savings compared to reconducting I think there's going to be other discussion uh about PPO how how the dynamic collaborating um option by PPO has helped reduce a lot of cost um but uh there's also other benefits many of the European studies indicate that dlr's contribution uh will enhance wind integration they tend to reduce when when curcuminum by 15 to 20 depending on where it is and they can be installed pretty much quickly Belgium was a prime example of those and it furthermore enables more generation to interconnect as well because you're seeing less congestion on the in a study that we did and it's part of uh further readings that I'll discuss later we found that using the three types of uh good enhancing technologies that I mentioned topology optimization Dynamic line reading and advanced powerful control using the Southwest powerful as a test bed can allow double the amount of Renewables to be integrated and the payback period of these great enhancing Technologies for about half a year so you can see that benefit and it also helps to increase the operational awareness because without Dynamic lamb reading you actually don't know how much your line is sagging or how much it's annealing but you get that information along and uh again it's very low cost so it will very very much help cash stranded utilities I um before we go into that uh one one thing to remember about these technologies that they're actually utilizing the existing grid they exist they're trying to enhance the way that you use the existing grid again similar to the GPS in your car the GPS will help you utilize the existing rules it's not necessarily making you build New Roads but it saves you a lot of driving time and so that is what's going on with the grid enhancing Technologies as well and um with that I am going to introduce you a few more reports that we've done and then hand it over to uh uh David who will talk about Dynamite line ratings on the PPO system
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sorry about that we had some um technical difficulties in the background there but um Bruce if that if that's um where you are going to um are going to are going to hold I'll pass it over to David to give us a deeper dive on Dynamic line ratings and provide his perspective um given his experience as a utility so um David if you're ready I will hand it over to you sounds good thanks Weezy I appreciate that intro Bruce uh essentially you know secretary Tepper actually teed it up in the beginning in that the power grid has historically had the tug of war between reliability and cost where we invest more in the system to improve reliability get those gains but then increase customer costs and vice versa we don't invest in the system well then we end up hurting reliability uh you know um putting hurdles in front of interconnections and loads trying to connect but there are new technologies and Innovation and initiatives that do achieve both that both improve the reliability in the system and give us uh Better Health Asset Health data enable us to make better maintenance and investment decisions and still reduce costs for customers and to us at PPL one of those foremost Technologies in order to to do that is dynamic line ratings this is a picture of a of a sensor that's open there actually relatively simple devices they essentially measure uh the the temperature of the year the temperature of the transmission line itself wind speed and vibration and what it enables us to do is when a transmission line is built whether it's an old line or a new line it's assigned a rating and that rating is assigned by Engineers that have to be conservative because if they're not Conservative then at the worst time of the year there could be a line failure so so they assume things like the worst case uh temperature say the middle of summer that they they may assume that there's no wind wanted because wind uh is one of the foremost factors that uh increases the lines rating so so they layer on and stack conservative assumptions and that becomes What's called the static rating of that transmission line what dynamic line readings enables us to do is basically peel back all those assumptions because we don't need to anymore because we're actually getting the real data we know what the wind speed is we know what the conductor temperature is we know what the temperature is outside at that point and it enables us to maximize the use of the equipment that's already been built and that and when we look to quantify those benefits the first line that we put this on was in in Pennsylvania was called the Harwood Susquehanna line it's from the Susquehanna area of Pennsylvania and it ended up saving an annual congestion across to customers 23 million dollars a year and the the project that would have also uh relieved that congestion was a rebuild project that we estimated would be about 50 million dollars we end up spending about quarter Mills 250 000 for the dynamic line rating installation of that specific line that generated these savings and I think our learnings from it too was that even if a rebuild is is a long-term solution it's had you know decades-long solution from the time that we decided to put Dynamic line ratings on our first line to the time the sensors were in the air sending back data was only six months so customers are able to realize those savings much faster than say a traditional solution even if the traditional solution was going to end up being needed in the future um and the other key to it for us was that when it comes to the major uh piece of equipment that make up the transition the transmission system like Transformers circuit breakers conductors most of the existing components already have Monitor and sensor packages that we outfit on so take a transfer we already have a Transformer monitor that sends back data so that we know we can optimize maintenance and reduce maintenance costs and and so that we know how what when it should be replaced and we don't replace it too soon or too far off we never had a good stream of data coming back on from our conductors and so somewhat of a side benefit to Dynamic light readings also is it gives us more data so that we're not replacing lines earlier than they need to be replaced or that we're not waiting too long either this is a this is an overview of the structure of what it looks like because there's a lot really the sensor is actually the easy part actually if I go back this picture here of the the gentleman hanging off the the helicopter that that was a picture of our first installation it literally takes about 15 minutes to hang the sensor and they can be they can be installed live and so the sensor really is somewhat of the the more simple part of the equation it's it's it's the it's the it Network and the algorithms that are Downstream of it that really are what make it work and so if we started from the left each line has multiple sensors um depending on um you know where it runs through a certain geography um and and this is you know some of the data that that is heading back and then it runs into a Cloud Server that basically runs algorithms on it which is based it has formulas that will calculate a rating based off of the data set that's coming in and pass them on is our vendor but there's numerous vendors um that that are available and if I just stay at the top essentially that once that rating is calculated it comes into our transmission control system and on our screens that are visible to operators and Etc we can see the ratings uh change we essentially get a new rating every five minutes and so so it it builds the path from sensor all the way through to the control center where it could be seen by operations and then separately as I mentioned about the asset Health beta Engineers are also able to take the health data and make smarter decisions on for maintenance and replacement I call this this top path kind of like the easy path of of getting it within our control center starting to look and digest the data and go from there but where it really hasn't Dynamic Glide ratings really has an impact to customers is when it starts to plug into real-time market operations and when we when we start to make decisions um on it based off of that that really helped the grid holistically and so the separate path is that it goes through and plugs into the local um RTO which in New England is like so New England and our footprint in Pennsylvania it's pjm and and they really have you know the minds that that um focus on market operations and have that great holistic view of the grid and when they're able to access the data they're able to connect dots that piece things together that also helps customers too and so this just kind of shows a block diagram topology of how it works I'm at PPL but it's really about the sensors the the formulas and the algorithms that we work with the vendors on and then really um tighten it not all the way through and working with the iso New England and the pjms to make it happen for customers um just to be transparent with some of the challenges that we we saw or are listed here maybe just that highlighted example of one of them the the second bullet here says ratings management so for instance we saw a 30 increase in our line ratings um went from the from the static reading to the lot the same line with Dynamic line ratings installed so 30 you know obviously is is a tremendous difference one of the things that we run into is typically on a transmission line the most limiting component is the line itself so now when you increase the value of that line you have to look to see if maybe there's a another limiting component that is different than the conductor so what we found was once we would put Dynamic line ratings on a line it would increase the rating so much that now maybe the limiting component is is a piece of equipment in a substation that that we we necessarily didn't have to worry about before so it also kind of changes our like our Paradigm on how we look at how the grid is built and where we invest that you know the good news is typically when you're investing on on say substation equipment it tends to be lower cost than when you're looking at rebuilding lines and so so those are just kind of new ways that our planning engineers and our standing engineer standards Engineers had to look at this subject in order to make sure that we're maximizing the use of the technology but I really have to you know call out just the different Regional transmission organizations like types of New England and PGM you know being a pleasure to work with as well as nerc and npcc and reliability first they really have a way of of looking pragmatically at these Technologies and and working to figure out how we can get over these challenges and welcome any questions and thank you again
thanks so much David appreciate that a deeper dive into DLR is extremely helpful in a great segue into Brent oberlin's presentation he will provide his perspective on the promise of grid enhancing Technologies and touch on some of the current deployment challenges as the grid operator so I will turn it over to you Brent Weezy can you see my screen
yes we can Brent okay thank you all right um good afternoon everybody so uh to go over a few things about grid enhancing Technologies um we'll jump right into it so as has been described so far uh the grid enhancing technologies that we're focused on today are those that are really looking at adjusting the topology of the system um Dynamic line readings power flow compo controllers and topology adjustment itself these are really things that allow us to maximize the use of the system which is potentially thermally limited and what I mean by that is those parts of the power system they're constrained by their ability to move power through A-line or a certain set of lines just based on the temperature limitations of that line so the grid enhancing Technologies allow us to move more power through the transmission facilities before they become overloaded and this is where you can have a fair amount of system benefit where you have thermal limitations kind of in your way however New England itself is not thermally limited for the most part most of our interfaces are to the point now where they're either stability or voltage based and what that means is we have to make sure that all the machines on the system remain in synchronism with each other they're all turning at the same speed and continue to do so and for some of the newer Technologies like batteries and wind farms and things like that we need to make sure that they stay online um and the reason that we have um gotten ourselves to the point of being voltage or stability limit on across most of the system is that we have made an extensive build out over the past 20 years and you can see report after report saying that there's very little congestion in the New England system so there may be a use case for grid enhancing Technologies but we really need to step back and make sure that we think about what their expense means and what complexity they bring to the system versus the benefit on a system that we have is low congestion and is voltage or stability Limited with that said there's already avenues for consideration of these Technologies under the current tariff it's interesting to see how the the technology is growing over time it was probably 10 years or so ago I had proposed installing um Power flow controllers on one of our lines and at that time there was this General outcry from numerous parties that cyber security was a a big Boogeyman that couldn't be overcome and we're seeing people make their way past that now which is fantastic so going to the First Technology um dlrs their their primary benefit is providing um up-to-date ratings in real time and near real-time operation in the system as David talked about there are getting better and better methods of forecasting in the 24 to 48 hour range they can be considered in planning but there there has to be certain considerations taken into account so and I most of these bullets were written with a uh a load serving thought in mind but there are other opportunities where grid enhancing Technologies like dlrs may actually be appropriate so we're doing planning studies you know this is going to sound silly but you still have to assume it's hot out during a summer Peak load condition and I'm actually going to skip down one if if we've done our rating methodologies correctly and the dlrs are working correctly under that super super hot day in the middle of the Summer where the wind has just kind of died the ratings The dlrs should be transmitting back to the control center should be those that are the same that are in this in the studies so when we're looking at load serving you're not going to gain a lot from that perspective moving to dlrs flipping the equation a little bit New England over probably the next eight ten years looks like it has the potential to go from a summer peaking system to a winter peaking system where the majority where the highest customer demand would be in the winter
we're moving toward ambient adjusted ratings which are ratings that are vary with ambient temperature they're not dlrs they don't account for the impact of wind speed but these ambient adjusted ratings will actually allow us to use generally higher equipment ratings as it gets colder out and this has an interesting knock-on effect that when we're doing winter Peak load and planning studies we will be able to assume a colder ambient temperature than we have been able to in the past so that's something that ambient adjusted ratings are bringing to the table like most areas of the country New England must Implement ambient adjusted readings by July of 2025 as a result of for order 81. and one of the things that implementation of ambient adjusted readings is bringing to the Forefront is that when we move forward with all the up upgrades to our software and processes Etc that are necessary for aars it's actually going to lay most of the groundwork we need for incorporating dlrs into real-time operations that was actually a big hurdle for a very long time I should note though that New England has been using manual ambient adjusted ratings for quite some time there's an actually an area on the system where the ratings are changed quite frequently so we can maximize the ability to export generation on a certain constrained pockets
so the real question that we need to answer much like my last slide is whether or not you know you go from The Next Step of moving from ambient adjusted readings to Dynamic line ratings because what you're picking up is the impact of wind and whether or not that cost is worth it okay the other pieces of Technology we're focused on today are powerful controllers and topology controllers and again the first bullet hopefully States the obvious that in order to create a meaningful change on the performance of the system these devices need to create a worthwhile change and impedance or topology you know if you just kind of nudge the system on the side you haven't accomplished anything and you might as well not have wasted your time since we're talking about changes changes that are notable enough to be able to move power to areas on different facilities than what they naturally would want to you need to be able to model and understand that and this is where the challenge comes in is we're currently facing a pretty growing issue where the devices that are being developed and manufactured you know it's fantastic Talent technology but it's actually moving ahead faster than the capabilities of the modeling software to um capture these devices understand what they're going to do and make sure they're right for the application we're already hitting this today um it's really fascinating um when we are able to again Implement controls and things like that on devices which have been around for 20 years but the the control methodologies are getting more and more complicated and we we can't really capture the benefit in these tools the typical tool that we use for longer term planning is called psse but the the more important and more concerning thing is what goes on in the energy management system this is a piece of software that is watching what the power system is doing 24 7 and making sure that is ready for certain categories of events any second of the day and if that isn't working right The Operators don't know where they are and they're not sure that they're providing a secure system to customers so this is something that really needs to be overcome um this is something we've been bringing up at various user group meetings begging these vendors to come forward with upgrade updates to the software so we can more easily incorporate these devices we're also running into computing power issues right now stability simulations are performed in offline studies rather than real time and that's okay when you have a fixed system that's well understood but as you begin adding more and more devices that increase the variability and what that system could look like then the difficulty in evaluating the necessary system States increases and so what happens is those that are doing the studies are going to need to make simplifications which may actually reduce some of the potential benefit of these devices for all these reasons we need to make sure that any automatic controls are simple and predictable so that operators can anticipate their actions so that we don't have anything unusual happen when system events are occurring well most folks don't understand is that as a storm is rolling through an area it's not uncommon to lose eight to ten transmission lines if at least momentarily and The Operators need to be able to make sure that they are understanding what the next steps are to take and if they have some incredibly complicated control C scheme out there they're not actually going to know where the system's headed
so similar to airs the iso has been manually implementing topology changes to improve system performance for quite a long time now um but we're actually looking for ways to improve that we are working with a software vendor that um their their package will automatically identify topology control solutions for thermal constraints now this is being done with an eye toward minimizing congestion and I would say it's pretty still pretty early in the uh the vendors development stage the iso is providing a significant amount of feedback but this is something that we are trying out I'm trying to see if we can squeeze more out of the system and get benefit for customers for so with that we see I'll turn it back to you great thank you Brent very helpful always great to hear from the grid operator and some of the unique challenges that you're seeing we are running just a couple minutes past so I will um I will turn it over to Jason to get started on panel two and thank you all again David Bruce and Brent for setting the table so nicely for the discussion take it away Jason yeah that was a great way to kick us off and I'll Echo the big thanks to our our first three panelists for providing um a really helpful grounding on these Technologies you know in in the first instance these tools need to work from a technology perspective but that's not the end of the story The the regulatory structure matters here um Brett noted that in terms of uh modeling the system that the capabilities of the model uh are being um outpaced by the technology and the same case may be applying with respect to the regulatory structure and there may be some catching up um from a regulatory standpoint and we have a great panel here to help us sort through that I'm going to invite uh Julia to uh to come off and to to begin the discussion by providing a high level overview
great thank you so much glad to be here I'm going to foolishly invite everyone to multitask while I speak very quickly but I've just dropped a link in the chat that gives you um some some basic graphics on what these three technologies that you've heard mentioned are how they work so um hopefully that's a useful reference in case uh in case anyone is is Lost And for those who are watching the recording you'll have to just uh find the walk Coalition website but um anyways I'm here to give you a overview of the regulatory landscape the first steps that are being taken today and then the wish list that we think will really bring good enhancing Technologies into common practice tool in the toolbox use on a daily basis so this is the what Coalition that I mentioned in my introduction you can see uh renewable energy developers a transmission owner clean energy finance and then lots of vendors who've had for enhancing Technologies commercialized for 10 plus years and deployed around the world so we're here to make sure that uh the U.S customers start seeing some of the benefits that we're seeing uh globally and and that uh David choir already mentioned uh Pennsylvania is seeing so the question I put to you all is where does traditional cost of service regulation get us and that's uh most transmission owners see a rate of return on their investments in transmission assets so those are multi-hundred million dollar transmission lines and we're talking about grid enhancing Technologies such as David's example you can see it costs only a quarter million dollars in that deployment that was saving 23 million dollars a year so what we're seeing is many Pilots few operational projects I've shared a screenshot of a map that the what Coalition has of um deployments in the United States and my dream is that you'll have to zoom in a lot further to see dots resolve in the next few years and the key obstacles we're seeing are inertia and and lack of experience in the United States and as uh Brent discussed there's a lot of integration into utility and system operator processes and planning and um uh standards that needs to happen so we're working on getting that moving but they're also is an incentive issue there's no reward or requirement for any uh anyone on the system to increase efficiency save money reduce congestion when it comes to the transmission system so it's nobody's job and nobody's incentivized to do it so this is a a key issue we think if that incentive problem is solved we would be looking at a different landscape in the United States
um so uh we are seeing some motion obviously uh this is a map of uh the different line reading methodologies that are used in the different rtos um as you can see several are capable of accepting Dynamic line ratings and all of them are required to accept Dynamic line ratings by 2025 in based on Fork order 881 which is mentioned earlier as well we also see ercot evaluating Dynamic line ratings in their economic transmission planning so that's a key thing that transmission planning has been done for decades maybe centuries based on reliability as the key goal and that should always be the key goal but there's also economics at play and transmission planners have the opportunity to reduce congestion and deliver cheaper power reliably through written enhancing Technologies another RTO action that we're really excited about is a brand new process launched in the Mid-Continent ISO using congestion costs um sorry inviting great off grid users to resolve congestion with topology optimization uh Solutions so essentially a generator for instance would say wow we're seeing a lot of curtailment we can be delivering cheaper power to customers if we open this circuit breaker close the circuit breaker they evaluate that Solution on their own and then propose it to miso and the transmission owner and miso and the transmission owner evaluate the reliability impacts and they have to see you know wide System benefit out of the solution they're not just trying to solve a problem for the grid user they're trying to look at the the full scope and then if uh the the solution passes muster then it's implemented and they're looking to do this whole process within 15 days so that's uh that's enough time to start saving money if there's an outage either planned or unplanned um and and we're really excited about this model as the first step in in implementing topology optimization in near real time uh let's see uh similar processes proposed at spp erkot's independent Market monitor also recommended a similar process so there's a lot of momentum behind this and we really appreciate miso's leadership and putting this together the organization of miso States was very engaged the market Monitor and miso is very engaged so it takes a whole uh spectrum of of folks to get these uh changes done but uh exciting momentum here and speaking of momentum secretary Tepper mentioned that we're expecting to see an interconnection rule out of ferc as soon as this week um and the notice of proposed rulemaking that put forward included a requirement to consider gets in interconnection uh studies and that would be a huge deal for grid enhancing Technologies it would mean that the isos would have to figure out how to model gets effectively uh and um and yeah that would just just be a big deal it won't be easy it will take some work but we think that this is worthy of being a top priority uh the planning noper or yeah notice of proposed rulemaking at Burke also includes a requirement to consider gets and then there are a few open inquiries that haven't reached the noper stage but they've taken stakeholder comments on so one of those is a requirement for utilities to evaluate gets based on a congestion threshold so if you have a line that's offering well maybe not 23 million dollars a year in congestion but it's it's creating uh for instance two million dollars a year that was the threshold proposed by pjm then you should consider grid enhancing Technologies to resolve that congestion and save money and deploy them if it's cost effective another model that the watt Coalition put forward with Advanced Energy United is a shared savings incentive which is a version of performance-based Regulation where utilities would share in the congestion uh mitigation value of gets so that's not the reliability benefits or visibility or or the 50 million dollar line that was avoided it's just the congestion value the utilities would save say 25 of the mitigated congestion would go to them 75 is still going to the customer 75 and that would be a way to create that incentive and get over that um the obstacle that I mentioned earlier and then finally independent transmission monitoring is an idea that came out of a Joint Task Force on electric Transmissions work on transmission Cost Containment and we think that having an independent monitor looking at transmission operations and and um with full uh information that would otherwise be you know uh sensitive uh that would help identify opportunities forgets give us more transparency because when we're talking about this potential requirement threshold and pjm puts forward two million dollars as a limit it's hard vendors certainly and I also other industry folks who work with the watt Coalition don't know how many lines that applies to whether they're voltage or stability or thermally limited so this transparency problem is is a big issue and that came up a lot two Sundays ago The Joint Task Force took up grid enhancing Technologies as their um topic that's the for Commissioners and then 10 State utility Commissioners and transparency came up many times in terms of understanding what's going on trying to motor through here there are also doe programs to support gets deployments we count 13 billion dollars that came out of the infrastructure investment and jobs act where gets are eligible uh Technologies so uh that should also hopefully help uh see more deployment I want to just drill down on interconnection since we're looking at a notice of proposed rulemaking or sorry a rule out of the noper um a story that that really drove the point home for me was when a what member talked about these one to three percent line overloads that came up in system impact studies for their projects and they were quoted 50 to 400 million not a typo uh in terms of rebuilding those lines to make their projects viable and these one to three percent line overloads are firmly in the realm of what DLR for instance could solve uh but the transmission owners in these cases weren't comfortable with those as Solutions so we really think that a requirement to consider guests and interconnection uh we could start to see guts deployed in situations like this and as uh David mentioned gets deployments are completed in months while big line rebuilds are completed in in years uh if you can even get your outage scheduled so we're looking to reduce interconnection costs shorten study and construction timelines serve as Bridge projects to get some of the capacity needed as bigger upgrades are underway I think Bruce mentions that value of gets and then hopefully see fewer project withdrawals because when when a project gets a quote for a 400 million dollar upgrade it's really unlikely to to be built so with that I will pass it to my colleagues but thanks everyone for your attention
that was a wonderful presentation Julia thank you so much um very helpful lead into our remaining panelists talking about the regulatory landscape a couple just quick notes um one you've seen slide presentations here the first two panels are going to involve slide decks and then the final panel will not involve slides and we're going to work to uh to post the slides on our website uh following the event another quick note for those who are relatively new in this space you've heard a lot of reference to organizations like pjm miso spp those are grid operators for their respective Regions they're they're basically the equivalent of of isino England operating um up here in our region um so I am going to now ask Katie to come on and uh take a deeper dive into the regulatory process and with some focus on on pjm and current activities there thanks Katie great yeah thank you Jason and can you hear me all right yes wonderful
all right hello everyone um I'm Katie signer again and as Jason mentioned I will be talking about the regulatory landscape forgets at the RTO level drawing on ongoing project experience um that RMI has uh that includes a third-party analysis and stakeholder engagement around Getz in the pjm region which spans much of the Mid-Atlantic all the way west to Illinois and yeah the motivation for this project was really a hope of catalyzing more gets uptake in service of alleviating some of the interconnection bottleneck in pjm which is really severe and you know PDM is taking steps to reform their interconnection study process but in the meantime not accepting new interconnection applications until 2026. so we're hoping that by demonstrating strong techno economic potential through a study of gets similar to the type of report that battle group did in spp a few years ago and then bringing our findings to pjm but also to utilities and states and other stakeholders who might be interested in gets in their Associated benefits such as bringing more clean energy online more quickly and their cost-saving potential that we can spur action here and try to get some gets deployed as a near-term solution to the interconnection issues that pjm as well as other rtos are facing so I'll get into how gets are considered at the RTO level today drawing mostly on my pjm experience the case for regulatory change and then opportunities for better integrating gets into Regional interconnection as well as transmission transmission planning processes
So Right Now pjm does not explicitly include any study consideration or encouragement of gets in its planning and operations they're you know an ad hoc transmission tool that can be proposed and deployed at the decision or discussion of a transmission owning utility in pjm's footprint and as Julia discussed there are some incentive issues as well as just a general lack of familiarity with these new transmission technologies that maybe preventing gets from scaling their deployment beyond the pilot phase but fortunately that lack of familiarity is starting to change and both utilities like PPL as well as pjm are starting to gain more experience with gets through both you know real world deployments and then through study and Analysis so pjm's applied Innovations Group which is essentially their internal R D team has on ongoing analysis and evaluation of gets Technologies underway building up those those modeling capabilities that Brent mentioned are so important for Effective and reliable integration of gets onto grid operator systems and pjms partnered with utilities such as PPL with the handful of Pilots that now exist in the region of both Dynamic line ratings and more recently power flow controls which are being deployed as a network upgrade alternative in ComEd territory for a wind project in pjm's interconnection queue
so the factor means however you know despite these these promising signs um and Pilots that there's a lot of untapped potential for gets in pjm um and for that matter for the country at large as Julia's map indicates and you know as I mentioned pjm's interconnection queue has become uh incredibly backlogged with thousands of new mostly clean energy projects that are looking to connect to the grid and as you can see from the chart on the right in this slide pjm um like most regions there's actually more capacity in the interconnection queue than exists in pjm's entire system today um in operations so obviously not all of these projects will be built but the pretty anemic Pace at which uh new projects are coming online today due to the backlog and the associated delays and studying interconnecting projects that's emerging as just a really uh primary barrier artist state and federal clean energy and climate goals and what's more pjm is also experiencing increasing congestion on its transmission lines at the recent grid strategies report illustrates so you can see PJ on the singled out here but also you know Rising congestion costs or a pattern across all of the rtos included in the the chart on the left so there's an increasingly urgent need to build out the capacity of the grid but building new transmission and building for and paying for the network upgrades associated with interconnecting new projects takes a lot of time and money so guts have huge potential to help bridge this time and GAP and avoid delays in integrating new clean energy onto the system by ensuring that we're using um you know pjm or other rtos existing systems to their fullest potential and they can provide interconnecting customers with a quicker and cheaper Network upgrade option while more or bigger lines are being built out to fully enable the energy transition to take place in the region so I'll get into how we can realize that potential in the next slide um yeah and for this current project our focus is on regulatory changes that would bring gets into more um to be more fully incorporated into the planning Paradigm at rtos uh gets can also be there can be regulatory changes that address uh gets consideration in an operational context like um the example that Julia shared in miso with allowing Market participants to request topology optimization as a solution to cases of identified transmission congestion um but in terms of the the two primary Pathways to integrate gets into um planning contexts which could better support their update um in the short medium and longer term uh we have integrating gets into the interconnection study process first off uh so the facility study could include as a default the consideration of gets of a possible Network upgrade um not just at the request of the interconnection customer which was the language that was proposed in the interconnection noper and could potentially be strengthened in the final rule we'll see but really just considering get to the network upgrade as a matter of course would be um I think a great Improvement to making sure that we're keeping Network upgrade costs to a reasonable level and then thereby reducing the number of projects that drop out of the interconnection queue because they're hit with uh such high Network upgrade costs that that would kill the economics of their project and the smart valve installations in ComEd territory to facilitate the interconnection of a wind project in Central Illinois is a promising example of this type of an application of gets and then as far as you know taking that idea for regulatory change and making it a reality in pjm the stakeholder process here could involve bringing up this issue or this proposed reform and the interconnection process subcommittee that's ongoing at pjm or perhaps developing language around this as part of the compliance filing for the ferc final interconnection rule depending on what the language around gets ends up being there and now the second pathway for regulatory change is ensuring that gets are routinely considered in transmission planning that pjm is doing so pjm's um the rtep is their um Regional transmission expansion plan process and that could include a consideration or cost-benefit analyzes that identify gets as uh you know as Bruce mentioned at the complementary Transmission Solution to some of the build out of new lines that's needed and promisingly here pjm is launching a new long-term transmission planning process and just held a workshop on this last week so that that could be an opportunity to engage and you know secure gets consideration as part of the new scenarios that they're building out there and then we'll see what the the final Fork order on transmission planning says although the the release of that final order is um further out than than the the interconnection order which is imminent um so I will wrap up here and I'll also note that if there are specific questions on the analysis component of rmi's pjm gets project or state specific options for encouraging gets uptake I have a few reference slides that I think Jason will send out and I can speak to those as well but I'll pass it back to you Jason and look forward to the continued discussion thanks so much Katie and uh really helpful to to hear about how other regions are working to deploy guts and hearing about some of the the current regulatory processes that that are in place um we also will be actively monitoring um Thursday's perk meeting and look forward to seeing what comes out in a final rule related to the interconnection uh Q reforms um Tehran Hill is up next uh good to see you Tehran and uh Toronto is going to help us marry the Regulatory and the Practical and talk about um some of the experiences that National Grid has had in terms of integrating uh gets across multiple regions turn over to you
oh awesome thank you um let me just get my slides up
hopefully everyone can see the slides let me know if you can't um so National Grid has experience um deporing get some multiple jurisdictions due to our service area being both in New England New York as well as in the UK um one of the things that I really want to touch upon is that when you think about gas and many of the panelists today have really touched upon this it's not just a technology and in the the opportunities as well as the um the capabilities of a technology itself but it's also how you look at transmission planning and how you look at the and the policies that are part of that transmission planning landscape that help to enable transmission for a clean energy feature as well as being able to utilize guests is really a complement to really help um Bridge the capability on the existing system that exists today as well as being something that can help us to move forward with Renewables and clean energy implementation on a quick basis while we're still planning out the transmission system and constructing this transmission assets many of the panelists have noted earlier that it takes time to build transmission it takes time to permit it it takes time to make sure you have the right Solutions it takes time to make sure you have the stakeholders on war and so get so many cases can help us to really bridge that Gap and to move forward on a very quick basis when you think about New England New England has aggressive transmission um aggressive clean energy goes in place to really decarbonize and that those goals are are absolutely essential they're the right goals um they're the goals that's needed to create a clean energy economy um and create jobs um for New England but it's also needed in order to help bring down the cost of energy over the long term at the same time that we need to put on a significant amount of clean energy resources onto the network we're also seeing in the future that load is going to grow up and Transportation specifically is going to create significant load demand on our networks when you think about just medium and heavy duty Vehicles alone our own independent studies show that medium heavy duty vehicles are small portion of the vehicles on in the Commonwealth however they have an outsized impact when it comes to pollution in particular emissions and so the need to really start to decarbonize trans patients is That's essential when it comes to move moving as towards a clean energy economy and decarbonizing when you think about putting more clean energy resources onto the network while at the same time accounting for future low growth in all cases transmission is essential to that clear Energy Future and one of the things that um when you think about transmission is that we should be thinking about how we utilize and the secretary spoke about this earlier utilizing existing transmission corridors and right-of-way our customers and communities are telling us that they they want to minimize the impact of new infrastructure in their communities and one way to do that is by utilizing upgrading existing rights of way we must also start thinking about how do we deploy transmission ahead of the generation resources noting that it can take many years to build transmission but far less years in order to put new generation resources into the network and so this is why we look at gas we look at guests because they can be deported quickly very often they don't require line allergies and one of the things when we think about gas is that we have to start thinking about them not just in terms of planning but and and congestion reduction but also how can we use gas in order to um to do things like outage management for instance and be able to reduce localize impacts that are fairly temporary session we can get towards that more clear energy Vision in in landscape that we we all hope for
National Grid when we start thinking about gas
we were starting to think about where are those technologies that we need to to really look at that will have a ability to allow us to optimize the existing system and be a lower cost for customers really starting to realize that not all solutions that's going to help us get to that clear Energy Future means still in the ground we start small working with industry partners and we did a small demonstration project here in Commonwealth on two of our 115 circuits really just trying to get more experience with the technology and understand how it could impact our system you can see some of the real-time dashboards that um from a point in time from those deployments in which we did two Dr deployments one that was a a contact sensor that was supported directly on the conductor another one that was a non-contact sensor that was deported on the transmission line itself that's what that picture is of um that uses to run I just I'm not seeing the slides Advance on on my computer I don't know if others are but is there a delay or are you still in slide two I'm still on the first slide oh really that's funny it's the point it's um it's moving around my my side let me stop sharing for a second
we'll give a try and if you can't do it I can pull up the deck as well
you might pull up the deck to see if it works in your side sure just give me a second
foreign
can you see the deck I can see on my side thank you sorry about that no problem so that's uh so no one saw slide two when I was going through I don't think so I I you should be on slide through two now and let me know when you want me to Advance it so just uh when I was going through the um indeeds of Transportation I just want to highlight here since no one saw the sled earlier um we think about medium heavy duty vehicles um National Grid working with co-star RMI we've done some studies that show that there's going to be a huge need to Electrify um the transportation sector and that it's actually a significant amount of load so I just want to point people to that study I'm not going to repeat the rest of this life but that study is something that folks should look at because I don't think people realize um the impact especially of medium heavy duty Vehicles will have on our on our electric grid Jason if you can go to slide three
and this is the site where I was talking about National Grids deployment of DLR here in the Commonwealth in which we deploy um two different types of sensors um looking at both a non-contact sensor which is that picture right there you see as well as a contact sensor which is similar to the type of sensor that um David in his presentation earlier was talking about and which just jump into the results of this study um one of the things that we saw is that when you look at Dynamic ratings versus um static ratings we saw roughly a 30 increase in in the ratings however some of the things to denote and Brent spoke about this earlier is that we think about DLR it's not just that line itself but it's also um Downstream um impacts of of that increase in flow over that circuit and so when we think about Dynamic line rating we wanted to get a sense of is this viable technology and our our studies show that it absolutely is a viable technology that has a lot of premise but it's very important that we look at from a a full Regional network type of approach and when you go to slide four
when it comes to looking at specific cases all these Technologies are really about what is the problem that you're trying to solve as well as what's the location because it's very important that you put these in the right location that have the type of effect an outcome that you want to have and one of the things that we we found in New York is that in New York we have a significant of onshore wind um located out in Western New York and many times that day there isn't a lot of load in Western New York most of the load is towards Eastern New York and and downstate New York that there could be a snippet amount of curtailments of that onshore when but one of the things that you that where DLR is great especially for for when resources is that if the wind's blowing that and the wind is generating it has a cooling effect on the transmission line and so these are places where you can see DLR having a great benefit to the network because there is that cool on effect which means that there should be more capability in the in the in the circuit to allow the win to not be quartel and to to have benefits to the system are um one of the things I love to point out is the New York climate leadership and Community protection act and this is a type of policy landscape that I believe is really instrumental in helping to move forward the type of outcomes that we want to see when it comes to decarbonizing the system and and bringing more transmission onto the networks in the New York clcpa the regular challenge to the utility is to say hey here's the outcome that we're looking for we want to see 70 Renewables by 2030 Net Zero by 2040 and the way to move that forward is the existing transmission Network in which we have we've already built up a significant amount of transmission and the way that the move forward is to upgrade those existing assets by taking things like asset condition projects and looking at the the upgrades that can really help to give you multiple benefits not just rebuilding light for like but also bringing more capability in order to get more Renewables and the quartality that mitigate curtailments of the existing resources while planning for future resources so in New York the utilities have put together plans to build out the transmission Network ahead of Renewables coming online excessive transmission is there poor Renewables that move forward while at the same time reducing the amount of curtailments that we currently see and in this case DLR was used in order to increase additional Headroom of 150 megawatts for that Western New York win while at the same time we're still moving forward reconducting projects to address asset condition assets issues on those lines the key thing here is that unlike the demo that we did in Massachusetts the New York Department was is directly being plugged into our our EMS our energy management system which is critical if you're going to really realize those benefits in Slide Five if I move towards the UK in the UK you have a significant amount of win resources that's located in the north of the UK in Scotland area While most of the load is located in the south of the UK and England Wells and the the regulatory regime over over in the UK is very different than it is here in the Northeast um us so it's very different than this in the US in general in which transmission owners are really incentivized for the outcomes the outposts they call them um that regulators and policy makers want to see and so under um the framework that they call it Rio revenues equals incentives plus Innovation plus outputs the transmission owners have an incentive to really look at new technologies and new Innovations in order to make sure that they're getting the right income outcomes for customers one of the um cases we use a power flow converters in order to really increase the Flows In which uh prior we had overloads because of the amount of of when that was located um in Scotland and we were able to use um part flow converters in order to deploy those in strategic places throughout the grad and we found that that congestion on the network was uh was reduced and which were calculating about 470 million dollars in savings the is a shared um savings approach over there with real and so those shared savings go back to customer but also it amounts to higher revenues for transmission on ours and at the end of the day it pays for itself we're looking at in the UK ability to the poor power flow converters across the system in which we believe that there's up to 10 gigawatts of capacity that can be unlocked by doing that we move to slide six some things to note though is that and and Brent talked about this earlier is that there are some challenges um guess is is something that we absolutely should be looking at um is something that can help us with inner connections it can help us with the system but they come with challenges that are no small Challenge and they have to be mitigated in order to really see um a huge amount of deployment a significant amount of deployment of these of these Technologies and one of the biggest issues is really the The Familiar is familiarizing what power electronic Technologies on our system and what that means to how do we model these Technologies and what means to the protection systems such that we're not actually creating more challenges as we move forward a lot of these other issues have been talked about but two of the things I really want to hit upon is New England operates some very small geographical area and our system is affected by what happens actually in other neighboring um control areas and so sometimes you may find that some of these Technologies actually like when you think about voltage constraints in New York and how they affect New England I need to deploy outside of the region actually to have a bigger impact and so there is a need for us to not just look at what's needed for New England but to also look at our adjacent systems and what's needed for the Northeast in order for us to really start to um utilize those systems in a way that can help us to decarbonize quicker if there's one thing I can leave you with is that at the end of the day gets as a is is complement to transmission we still need to upgrade our existing system we should upgrade our existing system within the existing Corridor session we can minimize Community impacts but as we're upgrading the system because it takes a long time to build transmission we should be looking at gets in order to help bridge that Gap such that we can get more Renewables on the system quicker is is when you think about the the previous presentations by Julian Katie there is a real need to get the the interconnection process right there's a real need to get Renewables on the system it took us 30 years to go from a system that was mostly oil and coal to natural gas it cannot take us 30 years to go from a system that's mostly natural gas to Renewables thank you Jason
thank you Charon is really uh above and beyond not only did you talk about how gets interact um between systems but also you gave us a little bit of a flavor for guest deployment across the pond it was really helpful um I'm now gonna we're gonna move right into the the panel discussion this is sort of the our rolled up the sleeves um whiteboarding maybe part of the a program and um I'm gonna ask everyone to to come on and uh also note that I'm gonna enable the the Q a feature in a moment um so if people want to start putting questions in we can get to those as well um I think I'm gonna I'm gonna sort of exercise the uh moderators prerogative and and ask uh the first question to kick things off um from listening to your presentations earlier it does seem like in an area with a lot of congestion that um deploying gets is is really a no sort of least regrets or no regrets type of a strategy um we heard earlier that there's uh very little congestion in the ice New England region so my question is whether or not there's a case to be made for deploying gets um in our region uh here in New England um at this time I'll open up to whoever wants to start Bruce raises hand first sure um one of the studies that New England ice on New England is doing right now if I understand it correctly is trying to look at topology optimization in a ways to reduce congestion or uh production costs increase during outages what topology control does it opens and closes lines and uh directs the flow away from the congested areas so it's like closing the entrance on a highway when there's congestion on that highway so the cars will not enter the highway there and and make the congestion worse so by doing that it's actually helping reducing the congestion during outages or potentially rescheduling the outages so that the outage impact is minimal so that is something that all the systems can do and I commend New England for doing that also for New England for having a policy internally saying uh when you plan on an outage you have you better make sure that the congestion impact is minimal that is something more to look forward to but those things are what topology optimization can do and it also shows that it can be these Technologies can use for planning it not only operations as well
Dave did you have a reaction or another follow-up no just to follow to what Bruce said um you know we are our first two cases for dynamic live ratings at least were related to congestion as the primary factor we have kicked off Pilots after that like we we've installed um DLR and we've established five other lines that are more interconnection focused it is a mix of interconnecting generators as well as interconnecting I'll say load because you know we're also looking at it from the standpoint of like Economic Development sometimes there's businesses and things like that that want to come in and connect but then when they see the the cost that connect it could be a hurdle um to them connecting to the system what we're starting to find initially is that when you just match up a dynamic line rating say sensor pilot with a single generator especially if it's a renewable generator it's hard to match because you have like Dynamic generation with Dynamic um basic rewind ratings but where you can put it in a location where it's a little bit more diverse and aggregated with different renewable generators or a mix of interconnecting generation and load we are finding that it kind of increases that threshold to allow cheap interconnection and so you know that's kind of where we're focused next um there's more definitely more challenges with the interconnection side of it but you know we're optimistic that we can find some really good use cases for it
Julius I see you uh nodding your head Julie and and this this Maybe Might um relate to some of your discussion about interconnection cue issues yeah there was a good study by the Idaho National Laboratory that looked at an offshore wind interconnection point in southeast Massachusetts and looked at potential curtailment of of winds interconnecting there in the future and looked at grid enhancing Technologies as a potential uh solution to that congestion so I think as ISO New England looks to the future hopefully gets her being used to um increased capacity at those you know relatively few good points for clean energy interconnection especially offshore
right yeah Julia just uh stole my thunder I think right now um there's a few applications where I think there may be some um cost benefit value for New England customers on the system but I think when we look forward that's where we'll see the potential for the use of these Technologies
anyone else want to think of stab or you want to move to the next question
maybe I'll just add from a grid strategies perspective which is my employer and Katie referenced our study that showed limited congestion in ISO New England but Tehran mentioned that uh interconnection between regions around ISO New England is is limited and that could be an area where increasing transmission capacity has a big impact and and uh congestion between isos is not super well documented so there could be a big opportunity there
assistant secretary nuara turn it to you for a question and I'll I'm going to take a look at the Q a while you're doing that sure and um I'm looking at some of the Q a now and um you know we've got an audience with um you know a variety of backgrounds and and some are very new to the subject matter some of you mentioned um you know reconductoring and how uh grid enhancing Technologies can avoid the need to some extent uh for reconductor and can someone just break down what what it means to reconduct or align and and um and toron I see you coming off mute you you mentioned this um specifically and then also just building on that question you know what what can grid enhancing Technologies do in addition to avoiding the need for reconductoring are there kind of a menu of of benefits that um that we uh that we will see sure I can help out with um what is reconductoring um because I think I I set the word reconduct during earlier in my presentation the um so if you think about transmission line usually we just call them lines but uh the actual thing carrying the power that line is uh conductor and when we say reconductory we put out new conductor um on that line and in doing so um many of our transmission lines especially here in Northeast was were built um 30 40 years ago some lines are even older than that and so the Technology's improved quite a bit and so very often you can have a line of the same voltage but put a a newer conductor on that line and increase the capacity um by doing so sometimes we do also reconductor at a higher voltage too in order to carry even more uh power through through that Corridor um it's important because of the end of the day we do have a fairly significant transmission Network across the Northeast and it's going to be important that we utilize the existing corridors that already exist in order to carry more power because corridors such that we're not um disturbing communities and and utilizing the the assets are already there reconductoring is going to be a huge amount of the type of upgrades that we see going forward and in the case of New York where I was talking about that DLR deployment um we were using DLR in order to get capacity for while we're going through that reconducting project so I was able to really use a technology in order to get benefits today because it takes still it takes time to build transmission and so it allowed us to for the existing wind farms that were being curtailed that allowed us to increase the capacity of those wind farms but at the same time get even bigger upgrade going session we can help out future generation that wants to connect to our system
if you want to add anything about reconductory
great thank you Tehran another question from q a Jason I have a question as the Q a is starting to come in um this this references back so some comments during the earlier presentation but um you know just wondering what the utility case is for uh deploying gets I mean traditionally utilities have um they've they've put assets into operation they return they earn a return on a return of investment what what's the case for utilities to use gats and is there a need to um provide different kinds of incentives or regulatory structures around that like Performance Based I don't know if yeah Dave I thought maybe you were you were Toronto might be well positioned to address that initially and then others please jump in I'll just saying I mean most transmission issues or or upcoming violations on the system have have numerous solutions that that could work and you know our perspective is dynamic live readings is now another tool in our toolbox it also happens to be one that's very inexpensive compared to other Solutions so for us Dynamic libraries can be used on a line that's the right thing to do by the customer is is to use it um and you know so for us you know we've been asked by ferc and things like that after we got our pilot up and running and it started to plug into market operations you know we were asked like like why did you do it and you know um there isn't as much incentive for this but our response was basically like like you know we're we're a regulated company that is entrusted with customers and when there's a technology or or innovation that is is what's best for the customer that we have an obligation to use it and so you know wherever there's congestion or as a health club um issues and things like that on the line just because of the cost of it is dynamic line raise rating solves it and that's always planning for us
foreign
just said the the end of the day as a utility we're entrusted with ensuring that we not only maintain a reliability and safety of the networks but that we're also helping to facilitate that policy that our Stakes have put forward in our the federal government to put forward and so when you think about that need uh that the Commonwealth has has told us that we are going to be one of the states in the country there are aggressively moving forward with the carbonization New York has said the same thing in the in the in in the jurisdiction that we operate as well as the UK um where National Group operates and so as a company we are completely committed to making sure that our transmission networks are not hindrance to facilitating that policy but help to enable that policy which means that we have to look at every solution and not for Discount any solution that could be available impossible and so for us it was really about well when you think about how much transmission needs to be upgraded it is significant how can we do it in a way that helps to move things faster and help to lower the cost for our customers
I might just weigh in on the incentive issue which uh is we we really see the need for a top down and bottom-up pressure on gets so if you have motivated forward-thinking engineers and folks like David and Tehran who are are pushing these Solutions that's great but the incentive issue is you know would uh would help with a top-down approach if you have folks who are um you know charged with the the fiscal health of the utility um and and aren't thinking as much on the engineering level uh you know we want them to be asking about these tools too and making it a priority in the organization
if I may add I think uh there's the financial uh well doing of the utility but you have to remember that the financial well doing of the utility is uh contingent on the repairs being able to pay the rates and what we observed is that in various renewable integration studies that are trying to figure out how much it's going to cost to achieve 100 clean energy the costs are significant they're in the billions of dollars sometimes approaching 100 billion dollars for let's say uh utility mid to large size utility and the fact that you're going to have to say have something like 50 to 100 billion dollars of debt alone is going to reduce your credit ratings by a few notches and that credit rating Notch drop alone is going to increase your rates by 20 30 percent so that's before any investment is done and so the gets actually has applying gets it were appropriate actually does have a secondary effect of making sure that the utility is financially healthy while the rate payers are not overly burdened by uh Investments That Could otherwise be avoided so that is another part of gets debts not necessarily always uh discussed about because we tend to focus more on the technicality and what it can do but that is one more side of the gets that we should be aware of
and I'll just add to this that um you know I like to to think of gets sometimes of the kin to um Energy Efficiency you know gets or like Energy Efficiency solutions for the grid um and in a similar way they um are can sometimes be overlooked or disincentivized because um you know they're so cheap or um you know they're they're just their Solutions not as um that might not be top of Mind in certain contexts but for for the role of a utility regulator like a state puc or state policy maker uh RMI just released a Blog last week that talks about four ways uh that that states like Massachusetts can help spur gets uptake by um kind of incrementally doing things like initiating an investigative proceeding and making sure that Utilities in their jurisdiction are are familiar with and experienced with gets and gain the relevant capacity building or skills to be ready to integrate them State Regulators can also requires consideration through something like a cost benefit analysis and then require deployments in in cases where the cost benefit analysis is positive they could also develop an incentive or do some other kind of performance-based rule making to to remove a disincentive that might be present for gets and then finally states can also engage in RTO or ferc proceedings to make sure that um that gets our you know uh being deployed as widely and scaled as quickly as possible to to ensure that their states with RPS policies or other climate goals that their goals are not being stymied by by lack of available transmission
see another question that that came in has to do with vehicle electrification and it's um basically is as we sort of move as as a region toward um electrifying the transportation sector that's going to add more demand to the system is there a role that gets can play in terms of helping to to manage that demand um this and this may even go to Bruce to your point on affordability as well separate from the operations
Dave so I'll just say you know for us for our electric vehicle studies and forecasts I I think that you know the power grid was built to handle load so so far in our experience electric vehicles have less of uh of an impact on the grid than say like der does like two-way fall power and things like that and the just the electric vehicle use does tie up hosting capacities at the district at the distribution system level um which then does make it that say a solar generator on some time to alignment has a lot of EV on it maybe it makes it um more more of a challenge for them to interconnect but in some cases it could be actually be a help because now you don't have to worry about 2-8 full of power but it's locally ingested so from what we've seen we have not seen that many issues with with say increased electric vehicle usage on our grid and even our forecast like worst case forecasts really aren't that bad but but it is it is an example of why it's a to study the application of gets at lower voltage levels because there is a lot happening at those lower voltage levels where there could be two use cases that we haven't take advantage of yet and just one quick follow-up on that Dave on your point by lower voltage levels you mean it could be the distribution system you know we've been talking about implementing gaps on the ice into England higher voltage system but that's another potential pathway is is there is there any work being done in the at the distribution level in New England that you're aware of with respect to these Technologies so so not yet in New England we do have one pilot and distribution in a different territory where we we do plan to in Rhode Island um to run a pilot at the distribution level because what we found is that you know when you get that percentage of increase at this distribution and you can go to the the next interconnecting generator or load customer and say actually you don't really have any upgrade costs I mean that that really is huge for for that customer and so um that's kind of like one of one of like our mindsets and and goals just one of the things contrast cost wise though is you know transmission projects tend to be expensive so if you can defer or supplant transmission project with DLR it's like a no-brainer cost comparison but a distribution level the projects aren't as expensive and so the cost difference isn't as much so it's sometimes harder to get over the cost threshold where it might be cheaper to reconduct their distribution line not necessarily cheaper but it's not not as big of a of a of a difference than to the DOR solution that makes sense
we are going to turn it to you for the next question sure so um building off of the very first question you asked Jason just given the um the real meaningful limits here in New England being voltage and stability um curious Brent your thoughts on um whether there's you know a category of grid enhancing technologies that has maybe the most promise here in New England um just given some of your your comments from earlier so um probably the thing that I I think shows the most promise over time so let me back up for a second so you can kind of see um we're getting more and more detailed with the way we rate equipment um ISO New England already has the ability to manually adjust ratings based on ambient temperatures with order 881 that'll become automated so then if you go to Dynamic line readings that allows us to bring in the impact of wind so it's really whether or not that each of these incremental costs is worthwhile but I can easily see that in the future with the way essentially a lot of the wind farms are interconnecting they have a limited resource you know where it is um and so I I see the potential for dynamic line ratings being used but it has David alluded to we want to be careful that we're not you know right at the exit path of a single generator and trying to chase ratings up down up down up down the rest of the systems has to balance against that but I do think that from um a congestion reduction point of view that's really where there's going to be a fair amount of potential in the future we have looked at different types of power flow control in New England contrary to what some people have seen here the uh the cost estimates we got are actually about twice as much as conventional technology so we again looking at Cost effectiveness of the devices we didn't move forward with that so I I think there are applications and it is something we watch out for but I think market efficiency is really going to be where the potential exists
that's helpful Brent any any reaction from our panelists
not exactly uh to the question but I want to highlight that and I hope that uh Brent shares this view that the isos and utilities are dealing with a transition to uh Dynamic um modeling and and other uh and and uh probabilistic uh methods in other contexts so with uh renewable energy forecasting and and capacity accreditation and these other topics have seen a transition from you know a supposed certainty and consistency to something that's more dependent on ambient conditions so I think there's this is a change yeah it's I'm sure a culture shift going on and changes uh going on throughout these organizations that uh are very interesting and exciting
about another question that came in on the Q a um and and just I think the broader context is we've talked a lot about how gets can address issues of congestion market efficiency we haven't talked as much about reliability specifically and this question asks how gets might help address some of um New England's winter reliability challenges um Brent I guess I'll start with you but also I'm going to say that you know you're you're a transmission planner you have colleagues that are involved in in operations and and winter issues maybe more specifically so um understand if uh if you wanna uh defer um in the first instance
yeah so I I talked about this earlier um when I was talking about the ambient adjusted line readings one of the things will allow us to do for winter Peak load conditions um let me back up so today we have a static line rating I'm not going to try and hide from that unless we actually are given updated ratings into our control room by the utility owners so it's a 50 degree Fahrenheit rating in the winter um and that it's tough to have a very high winter load when it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit out right so in the future when we're studying the conditions that drive these absolutely incredible loads that we're talking about in our 2050 transmission study we're looking at doubling the system load from what we've ever experienced in the past we'll be able to better align our transmission facility ratings with conditions that more closely match um you know what it would take to get a peak load but that's still coming from the ambient adjusted we'll have to think through whether or not the wind impact is really meaningful enough to take that on so I I think the ambient adjusted like I talked about um with wheezy's question gets us a big step and I'm just not sure we'll have to evaluate whether or not there's benefit for the next step after that of being able to account for the impact of wind on that
first um following up on Brent's ambient adjusted I think there was a winter storm a few years ago where uh New England that New York were hammered by a winter storm and what New England did was it was when said New England is based on static ratings but they allowed ambient temperature ratings at the time and that allowed a lot more flow between the two systems which eventually um avoided black cultural pronouns or other reliability uh mishaps that could have happened so it's going forward and going back to Julia's comment on how the industry is evolving um look back in 10 years ago in 2010 uh when a lot of systems were looking at uh renewable integration studies in those days people said hey if you have more than 10 or 20 of Renewables it's going to collapse the system spp nowadays occasionally hits 90 Renewables their annual generation from wind is above 30 percent and that's only 10 years ago so I think in the next decade as people get used to these Technologies they're going to get used to the flexibility of the transmission just like they got used to the flexibility of generation so I'm hopeful that these technologies will help us get there in the long term but again uh these Technologies actually provide more value during extreme times like winter storms or whatnot
yeah and just building on that some of my colleagues did an analysis and released a Blog earlier this year about uh the potential for uh increased Renewables specifically wind and more transmission which I think could be include you know you could include gets in that more transmission bucket the potential of those two together to have avoided some of the blackouts we just saw last winter with winter storm Elliott so I can provide a link to that blog in the the chat Jason for you to share more widely but yeah I think you know gets similar to how uh transmission and a diverse resource mix can be assets for reliability gets can certainly play a role in that as well
so um just one real quick question and then I think we're going to move to uh your your key takeaways um and this question doesn't relate specifically to gets but I think it's it's in the context of um us envisioning these pop-up forums as really public educational opportunities the question is why New England has so much less congestion relative to other regions
I think I think the panel is uh is thinking it through but I mean I will note that there's been about 12 billion dollars of transmission built since 2002 and I think that has something to do with it Dave did you wanna did you want to add to that yeah I'll just I'll just say I can't speak for like ice in New England or or um so I don't want to speak out of term but typically when you look at congestion in any of the rtos it's driven by either a lack of transmission or a shift in the generation mix so where you see like generate generation retirements and New Generation coming online and things like that then that will typically adjust flows on this system and then congestion will start to come through so I think in New England it's kind of like like a somewhat of a of a mix of both there's been there's been a good healthy transmission build out then also coupled with you know there's there's a lot of generation in queue like take offshore wind 18 gigawatts and the isomova Q once that comes online we'll probably start to see congestion in the future because it'll change the flows so it's probably like a transmission build out coupled with a lack of of incoming new generation at this moment um that has caused a lack of suggestion maybe Brett you can like fact check the other thing but um
did you want to respond yeah I was trying to before my internet connection died right in the middle of you were asking a question so sorry about that um so again a little little history here if we go way back um when new resources were added to the New England transmission system they were built so that they could run under most conditions um so they were built and the interconnections to those resources were built such that there was very little congestion done to itself where we saw congestion coming in the mid to late 2000s was actually the opposite the system had been built around these resources and needed these older more expensive resources in order to reliably reliably serve the load so we spent you know 12 I think we're approaching 13 billion dollars soon making sure that we could run the system without Reliance on these resources it was incredibly expensive if the resource was wasn't available it was unreliable we received a lot of State feedback from state legislatures to never let this happen again so we built the system to do that um I think what's going to be different in the future is the interconnection uh resources are interconnecting under a different standard it's more of a competitive standard where they come on and they can their neighbor can be assumed to shut off next to them and that's really what's going to walk us into congestion because these are all very low cost resources once they're built their fuel cost is effectively zero and that's why I think we're going to be coming up behind congestion once these resources start to materialize but that's why we didn't have it in the past until we started getting into these resources trying to shut down or if you actually looked at what happened if they were not available for a day
thanks Brent one one last Quick one before we do some final thoughts final takeaways from the panelists we've got a lot of great questions coming in and trying to get to all of them but um just quickly is there enter is there any interplay between demand response resources and grid enhancing Technologies it gets to the question maybe earlier about their application on the distribution system but any thoughts there about the use of grid enhancing Technologies when it comes to a resource like demand response
go ahead Brent yeah um I think they're complementary I I don't see any reason you couldn't use one or both in certain circumstances I don't think one would displace the other
about it go ahead David yeah and increasingly the grid is going to be more and more of different Dynamic elements of the power grid coming together to still make it that there's you know 120 volts and 60 hertz at the at our outlets at our homes and uh you know dynamic line readings and and demand response and other forms of throttling generation are are just going to be key elements of of that new Dynamic grid that that and that that's how we'll get the most use from the grid that's built yeah and I'll also add that um you know as the system becomes more Dynamic it involves a broader set and more diverse set of resources to maintain reliability and meet load some a lot of these tools you know similarly offer more visibility more data and enhancements to the system um in addition to some of the the challenges that they might create with respect to learning curves and making sure that we can integrate these new resources um effectively while also you know not missing a step and running the good that we have I think yeah like um David was alluding to earlier some of the increased visibility and information that you can get from deploying these new technologies can be a real asset to utilities and grid operators
so we're we're uh we're coming to the end here um just wanted to give the the panelists an opportunity to provide um maybe a minute or two just on what your your key takeaways um would be from this forum I'm gonna um I'm just gonna look at the order of my boxes and start Katie I'm going to start back with you and work my way down sure um I'd say my my takeaway is that to me gets are the No Regrets tools that we should be installing wherever they make sense while we're figuring out how to solve for and build the the harder stuff like the new transmission lines um the new generation and everything else that we need to do to make sure that the energy transition goes full steam ahead for mitigating climate change
get to the highest low hanging fruit thanks Brent
yeah I think it's um I I think there are tools in the toolbox I don't think we should force fit anything we should look at the cost benefit you know certain applications of gets are extremely cheap and they should be looked at for their value but you know as I said too in my uh presentation we have a lot of um software and hardware issues to overcome you know we're making progress on that through order 881 things like that but these really have to be overcome before we can um you know go Hog Wild on this stuff
Julia yeah I think uh I recommend everyone check out the joint federal state task force on electric Transmissions recording of their meeting on July 16th there were some there was let off with a great presentation from epri about these Technologies and then also lots of commentary from State Regulators on the problems they're trying to solve the extent of their authority to solve them versus what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can do so anyways I'll start with that but one thing that came out of that meeting and I think also this meeting is that um to deploy gets effectively and get the full value out of them you the utilities will have to Departments of the utilities will have to talk to each other in a way that they maybe haven't before um and then different um groups across the regulatory world will also have to work together so I think there's a desiloing um transformation that will go on in addition to these uh technological Transitions and and all the other things going on so I know there there's a long list of priorities for transmission owners and system operators and utilities and I hope that the role of gets in addressing the clean energy integration the customer savings uh a swath of those priorities can be addressed with a swath of Technologies and and I hope that comes through thanks Bruce yeah I think I said this earlier about uh the folks in the industry have learned how to deal with uh variability of Renewables through generation and now it's kind of shifting from generation and transmission and uh one one key message that I like to make and I think we all understand it is that gets are not here to replace transmission it's more to augment transmission it's complementary um it it can just get a few things done at a much lower cost and at a much faster speed but it's never going to replace transmission it's never going to replace it's like GPS will help you drive easier but it's never going to replace the need for a car it's never going to replace the need for more roads so with that in mind I think it should be part of the overall bigger picture of planning rather than to say here's our transmission planning let's see if gets game fitted in I'd rather have everything including the demand response and other technologies that are out there to be part of the planning so that people can compare them easily among themselves and then try to put them in a separate bucket thanks Bruce Dave I think I'll just close that there are a lot of challenges to it to the full implementation of gets but they tend not to be as complex or difficult as with some sometimes they're presented as that a lot of the challenges go away as soon as you start to look at them and and overall um it's really not as complicated as often put forward so I I think to me it's it's like an action first orientation is is what's best um because once I think different companies and and others start to dig into it they'll find that a lot of the challenges go away
they're finishing out with you Tyrone
thank you I I think well just that is just that when you think about the the future Grid it's going to be a lot more Dynamic it's going to have a lot more variable energy resources on it we're going to depend on a lot more types of solutions to move us forward at the end of the day all of it requires transmission and we shouldn't be looking at gets as being a return to transmission as Bruce said earlier gets is transmission is more Innovation more technology to improve the real-time capability of the system is we we need to really start thinking about guests in that in that fashion what is the transmission upgrade that's going to get us to the least cost most efficient solution for customers
it's a great way to leave it off and just an enormous thank you from Mass eea to this panel couldn't ask for a better group of panelists to kick off what hopefully will be a series of pop-up forums and um really uh for folks like like me that don't have a technical background to really help me understand um this technology better and um it really is critical to us optimizing the system and transitioning to our future clean energy grid um just a quick note that we are going to work on getting the slides up at some point following this presentation as well as um work on getting uh this this session up in recorded form um so with that again I'll thank you and I'll Weezy I'm going to turn it back to you for uh for a final word thanks Jason um echoing your word of thanks really appreciate your time this afternoon and and uh providing such great information to folks who joined we had a great turnout and it's because of the Rockstar panel that we had uh today so thank you all again for your time and um any follow-up questions please be uh please be sure to send them our way and we'll hopefully get them answered thanks everybody take care have a good afternoon thank you thank you