Outages during Christmas reflect poorly on utility forecasting and natural gas units. It’s past time for the states and their utilities to lead and not wait until the grid regulators Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corporation conclude their joint investigation.

To ensure safety and reliability, utility leaders should pay consumers to reduce consumption, embrace distributed energy resources in their resource planning, and make interconnecting rooftop solar and residential storage easier.

The question is, however, will they?

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Join us on Feb. 6, 2023 in San Diego for the inaugural GridTECH Connect Forum, the only event that brings together utility leaders and distributed energy resource developers to overcome the challenges associated with interconnection. Learn more about the new, regional event from Clarion Energy today.

Join us for discussions on virtual power plants, fleet electrification, interconnection, demand response, and more, with a focus on the California market. Register today!

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Anticipating NERC’s response

FERC and NERC have announced a joint investigation into what happened in North Carolina during Winter Storm Elliot because of multiple outages during Christmas.

The economic and reliability regulators want to get in on regulation and standards after an event, but there is no focus or attention paid before. Maybe that’s just human tendency?

History has always told us, at least in the electric utility industry, that major regulations come after blackouts. The National Electric Reliability Council was formed after the 1965 blackout. Read about fascinating NERC history here (It’s only 177 pages!). NERC came out of regional councils such as Mid-Atlantic Area Coordination Group, which is now ReliabilityFirst.

The Council became a corporation —the North American Electric Reliability Corporation— after the Sep. 2003 blackout with the mandate to levy fines of up to $1 million per day if utilities violated reliability standards, including tree trimming regulations.

Incentivizing DERs before an event

Fast forward to Feb. 2021.

Did we learn anything from winter storm Uri in Texas? We have already forgotten that Texas went through a similar winter storm event a decade earlier, in 2011.

Yes, FERC and NERC jointly investigated and released a report back then. I am sure they will also release a report for Elliott, too. But the jury is still out on Uri’s lessons. A recent proposal in Texas to incentivize generators (not load) to ensure they show up during a grid emergency.

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The Texas Power Podcast explored the electricity market reform proposals being considered in response to Winter Storm Uri. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts.

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Look at what is happening right now in PJM

PJM just announced that it had more unit outages during the Christmas week than forecasted. If 23% of PJM’s total capacity was forced out, 87% was from natural gas and coal units. And we have executives from Duke Energy Carolinas apologizing for inconveniencing their customers during Christmas. These utilities and RTOs have not taken steps to incentivize demand response and distributed energy resources, yet they are the custodians of safety and reliability.

Why should they pay load to avoid blackouts? Because that’s how MISO avoided blackouts in Feb. 2021.

Utilities must speed up distributed resource interconnections via automation

Whenever the topic of distributed energy resources interconnection comes up, utilities always bring up the fact that they are responsible for the safety and reliability of the distribution grid. Never mind that those utilities have already studied these DER interconnections. They want to “screen” them again so that a solar project is not exporting more than it should when storage is added at the same site.

Solar interconnections can be severely limited on the distribution system due to capacity constraints that could be resolved without the cost and delay associated with major feeder upgrades. In some cases, voltage and current imbalance will limit the feeder capacity. This constraint exists even though capacity is available in other phases.

Companies like Switched Source offer a distribution automation solution, the Phase EQ, that will automatically balance the voltage and current to unlock the capacity of the feeder. In other cases, the ideal location to site a solar projec