America’s dramatic shift towards renewable energy generation in remote areas will require a substantial transmission build-out in the years ahead, potentially doubling or tripling the current grid. In other words, there is no transition without transmission. While it's crucial that we expedite the construction of large power lines at a much faster clip, there's another technology solution that demands equal attention. This parallel approach involves the use of Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs). GETs offer a modular, cost-effective path to enhancing our existing infrastructure while also significantly amplifying the efficacy of new transmission investments. To gain deeper insights into how GETs can help us meet the needs of the 21st-century electric grid, accelerate the clean energy transition, and lower energy costs, Gil Jenkins and Manish Chaturvedi spoke with Julia Selker, Executive Director of WATT Coalition.
America’s dramatic shift towards renewable energy generation in remote areas will require a substantial transmission build-out in the years ahead, potentially doubling or tripling the current grid. In other words, there is no transition without transmission. While it's crucial that we expedite the construction of large power lines at a much faster clip, there's another technology solution that demands equal attention. This parallel approach involves the use of Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs). GETs offer a modular, cost-effective path to enhancing our existing infrastructure while also significantly amplifying the efficacy of new transmission investments. To gain deeper insights into how GETs can help us meet the needs of the 21st-century electric grid, accelerate the clean energy transition, and lower energy costs, Gil Jenkins and Manish Chaturvedi spoke with Julia Selker, Executive Director of WATT Coalition.
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Julia Selker is Executive Director of the WATT Coalition and Director of Policy and Strategy and Chief Operating Officer for Grid Strategies. She previously worked for the Business Council on Sustainable Energy, the technology startup Faraday Grid, and interned with Congressman Peter DeFazio focused on energy and climate policy. Prior to coming to Washington, DC, Julia worked on the launch of Monterey Bay Community Power through the public relations agency Miller Maxfield, Inc., in Santa Cruz, California. Julia previously worked for the Bulleit Group, a San Francisco public relations agency. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Reed College.
Episode recorded December 8, 2023
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Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Julia Selker: Now, people realize the scale of the transmission infrastructure that's going to be needed, and it's clear that we cannot keep up with the level of expansion that we need just by building new lines
Gil: America’s dramatic shift towards renewable energy generation in remote areas will require a substantial transmission build out in the years ahead, potentially doubling or tripling the current grid. In other words, there is no transition without transmission.
While it's crucial that we expedite the construction of large power lines at a much faster clip, there's another technology solution that demands our equal attention. This parallel approach involves the use of Grid-Enhancing Technologies (or GETs). GETs offer a modular, cost-effective path to enhancing our existing infrastructure, while also significantly amplifying the efficacy of new transmission investments.
To gain deeper insights into how GETs can help us meet needs of the 21st-century electric grid, accelerate the clean energy transition and lower energy costs, we sat down with Julia Selker, Executive Director of the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies Coalition, better known as the WATT coalition.
Gil: Julia, welcome to Climate Positive.
Julia: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Gil: We're excited to have you. Maybe to start, we're here to talk about grid-enhancing technologies or GETs. Could you give us the best definition of how you describe the technologies themselves, and how they help accelerate the clean energy transition and lower energy costs?
Julia: Grid-enhancing technologies are hardware or software that increase the capacity, efficiency, reliability, safety of transmission facilities. Mostly where we talk about, though, is the capacity because the transmission grid today is being asked to do more than we've ever asked of it before. We're trying to undertake an energy transition and interconnect new resources, and those resources aren't in exactly the same places as the resources that are retiring. We need more transmission capacity and we need to use it differently. That's where these tools really come into play.
There are three technologies that I work with the most. Those are dynamic line ratings. They measure the true capacity of transmission lines based on ambient conditions. When you're running power through a line, the resistance in that wire is heating the line, but at the same time the wind is cooling it, and that can have a really significant impact. Today lines have static ratings, or seasonal ratings, or even ambient adjusted ratings, which are based on temperature, but with dynamic line ratings, you're really taking everything into account, and you're measuring the impacts of these factors on the line so you know the true capacity of the line and you're taking the guesswork out of it.
Gil: The dynamic line rating is, just quickly a follow-up on that, also called DLRs. We're going to have fun with acronyms today. That's like a physical piece of hardware on the line itself or on the tower? How does it work? Paint a picture for us of a DLR.
Julia: Dynamic line ratings are sensors that go either on the transmission tower, on the transmission line, or nearby. They either look at the line with LiDAR sensors or measure the line behavior itself by clamping onto the line, or some other DLR uses the fiber-optic cables that are strung alongside transmission towers to measure cooling impacts and heating impacts.
Gil: Cool. Number 2, you mentioned advanced power flow control. That's a mouthful. What is that? Why does it matter?
Julia: Advanced power flow controllers are placed at the substations. They make use of the fact that the grid is a mesh. There are often multiple circuits that could deliver power from one location to the generator to the load. These technologies alter the flow of power. If you have one circuit that's being overloaded, it's the path of least resistance. It's a phrase we all know. They can change that value and push the power onto a different circuit, and then you're unlocking the capacity from that additional route.
Gil: Bring it home. Topology optimization, the third core GET. Tell us.
Julia: This is software only. System operators of renewable energy companies use it to look at the grid assets, the grid conditions, the demand, the supply. The technology can identify reconfigurations, which will find the best way to deliver the lowest-cost energy, sort of like advanced power flow control, the power has one path that it wants to go on, but you don't necessarily need advanced power flow control to move it around. You could switch circuits at the substation itself or undertake other very low-cost interventions to alter the flow of power and on net increase the capacity of the grid.
Topology optimization or reconfigurations are already undertaken for reliability scenarios. If you have a generator that goes out, or you have a transmission line that goes out, utilities plan for that, and they'll look at reconfigurations for those situations, but with software they can evaluate those options much more quickly. It's a complicated thing to look at all the different impacts of changing the topology of the grid. You can now use reconfigurations for economic reasons or outage planning. All these other shorter-term efforts that utilities have to do.
Gil: Taking it back up a level. We understand the three core GETs technologies. Break down the key benefits, maybe starting with the cost savings piece. I think I read that GETs, if properly implemented, can decrease congestion costs by up to 40%. Talk a little bit about the cost savings and after that, how it can speed integration of renewables. You already hit on reliability. Maybe we can come back to that.
Julia: Yes, exactly. We're looking at cost savings, cleaner energy faster and then reliability through flexibility and awareness. On cost savings, from the market monitor reports of congestion costs, and that's when you can't deliver the lowest cost electricity so you have to use higher-cost electricity, that cost the systems over $20 billion in 2022. If we can decrease those costs by 40% by increasing line ratings, improving power flow control, and finding reconfigurations, there's billions and billions of dollars on the line every year.
These GETs are very low cost. In one study we did, and this only quantified one type of benefit, but $90 million of GETs technology deployments unlocked $175 million of yearly benefits. The GETs paid for themselves in six months and after that, you're just looking at net benefits to consumers. Other studies have found payback periods of up to two years, but again, the net savings start piling up pretty quickly.
Gil: All right. It seems like GETs are a no-brainer. What's the holdup? Why aren't we doing this everywhere? It sounds like here in America, from what I read, the Belgians and the Brits have a lead on us. Paint a picture. Again, what kind of changes do we need at the policy level to ensure wide deployment of GETs? Maybe in answering that, tell us a little bit more about the Watt Coalition, which HASI is proud to be a member of. Why aren't we doing more GETs?
Julia: Yes, absolutely. It's a structural problem. It's really nobody's job to address this hugely expensive transmission congestion. Utilities, their business model tends to be a return on equity. The more that they spend building the grid that creates their rate base, and then they're compensated based on how big that rate base is. If they deploy grid-enhancing technologies, that's a really low-cost tool.
For instance, one deployment of GETs costs $250,000 versus a $50 million line rebuild, and it reduced congestion by $23 million a year. That's just again, a slam dunk, but if you think about the rate base then we're looking at $250,000 versus $50 million. That's a big difference.
Manish: One thing I'm curious about, Julia, your take on is if utilities have this clear economic incentive to build large transmission infrastructure, not that that's not required. In some circumstances, that is required. Then what are the carrots and sticks we can deploy? What advice can we give the regulators and the policymakers? What needs to change the whole paradigm?
Julia: Where to begin? I think another element that's holding GETs back is that utilities are happy to do things the way they've always done them, and regulators are used to evaluating these proposals. They know what transmission line does, and maybe they don't know what a dynamic line rating device does. One approach that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken is a requirement to use ambient adjusted ratings. That's just a blanket requirement. That doesn't solve the incentive problem, but it does tell utilities, okay, you're going to increase transmission capacity based on ambient temperature at the very least.
That order 881 also require the RTOs to prepare to accept dynamic line ratings. In that case, we're solving a technological issue where the RTOs might not have been able to incorporate dynamic line ratings into their economic dispatch. That's an example of a requirement framework and Commissioner Christie at FERC in his concurrence on order of 2023 suggested that he's interested in a requirement for dynamic line ratings as well. Again, that doesn't resolve the incentive issue, but it does give the utility commission something to go off of.
If their utilities are required to use dynamic line ratings and they're not seeing those projects happening, they could ask them what's going on and why aren't my ratepayers seeing this benefit? There's a requirement framework that has been tested and used, but another direction is incentives. We've seen those be very effective in other countries. The UK has incentive frameworks for utilities to use lower-cost solutions versus baseline solutions, and then the utilities see compensation for that. Then in the Australian market, utilities can also spend some of their expenditures on innovation and they can see some revenue based on the success of the lower-cost solutions as well.
There's a proposal before FERC to create a shared savings incentive that if a utility deployed GETs and reduced congestion costs by a certain amount, they could keep a portion of those net savings over, say, three years. The utility could keep $2 million and the customers would then have $6 million of benefit for this deployment, for instance. Obviously, on the scale of that example I shared where the congestion costs were $23 million a year, that incentive could be high. The proposal caps the incentive, but the benefits that could be unlocked are significant.
Gil: That's a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with FERC right now, or?
Julia: It's a step back, actually. It was a technical conference. There is a bit of a record and comments from different entities on the shared savings incentive, but it did not make it to a NOPR. Similarly, the dynamic line ratings was a Notice of Inquiry on dynamic line ratings that could turn into a requirement, but again, that would have to get to the next stage of a NOPR.
Gil: Then it's possible though for a continuous to evolve and they've got to fix their makeup there, but that remains a focus of the group that you lead as well as other policies. Tell us a little bit about Watt.
Julia: The Watt Coalition started in 2017, and since then the need for transmission has just gotten more urgent, so we've grown a lot. It started with the dynamic line ratings, advanced power flow control and topology optimization companies. Then members like HASI and renewable energy developers. AES is our newest member, AES corporation, which does technology innovation. They have a utility branch and a clean energy branch. VELCO, the Vermont Electric Power Company. We have this diverse group of members that are all interested in seeing more transmission capacity at the lowest possible cost. We're looking at generator interconnection.
How can we reduce those upfront costs that are causing huge backlogs in the queue and killing projects? How can we improve deliverability of projects that are already online and they're seeing more and more curtailment as other new projects come online and demand pattern shift? Those are some of our key goals, but we've worked mostly at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission bringing these issues to light, suggesting policy directions, commenting on the work that FERC is doing, because transmission is fundamentally a federal jurisdictional issue and so FERC is the one who can fix most of these problems.
Now, states can also make progress. There's federal money from the Department of Energy that states and utilities can use to deploy GETs, so we're also engaging on those programs.
Gil: Let me ask you about that. There was, another acronym, in the bipartisan infrastructure law, I believe DOE, of course, they have the Grid Deployment Office. There was something announced recently called the GRIP Awards, which I think benefited some GETs projects. Can you talk a little bit about those incentives through the passage of bipartisan infrastructure laws and then the GRIP Awards themselves coming out of DOE and the potential for those projects that may be benefiting from the new government grants?
Julia: It's really exciting. It's a model that was built off of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2008. We've seen this happen before where the government put several billion dollars into grid modernization and we got synchrophasor units across the grid keeping better track of assets, and now they're doing it again. The Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, the first round of funding funded for GETs projects. Oh, actually five. Take that back. One at the Virginia Electric and Power Company for advanced power-flow control.
Duquesne Light Company is expanding their dynamic line rating deployments. EPRI and VELCO are working together on advanced power-flow control and then the Algonquin Power Fund is also working on power-flow control. National Grid, I believe, is going to deploy dynamic line ratings in New York. It's really exciting. These grants reduce the upfront cost for ratepayers. Of course, GETs pay for themselves quickly, but this way the ratepayers don't have to pony up the money. Especially for VELCO, for instance, they have a relatively small customer base. They're a non-profit utility, so having that federal funding really will make a difference.
Gil: How about the states? I think you alluded to it and I think you were at the NARUC conference last week. What's the reaction as you talk to public utility commissioners and regionally at the ISOs and RTOs? What are they doing that's a positive?
Julia: There was a great meeting in July of the federal and state joint task force on electric transmission that focused on GETs. That was 10 state commissioners from all different parts of the country, all different business models that they're regulating, vertically integrated utilities, competitive markets and they all saw the opportunity for GETs. They had different ideas for what kinds of incentives or requirements or oversight would help GETs be deployed in their different regions, but it was all a very productive discussion and the states see what's on the line.
It's increasing cost for customers if we don't unlock more transmission capacity, and their clean energy goals are on the line as well, so the states are really motivated. We have ideas for what states can do, but it really comes back to FERC, so it can be frustrating, I think, for the state regulators who want to see change, but it's not necessarily in their wheelhouse to do anything systematic. They can ask their utilities have they used GETs. We think this proposal would benefit from GETs. Please evaluate GETs, but they can't realign the incentives or create a requirement like that.
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Gil: One of the things that I'd like to just probe a bit on, we talked going back to the benefits about the wide deployment of GETs to accelerate the clean energy transition, address congestion and the interconnection queue backlog. I imagine this is very hard to model, but are there any studies that you point to that show the scaled impact of GETs on the transition? I think you've talked about the, or I've seen the Brattle Group's case study is perhaps one. Could you talk about that a bit?
Julia: There are a few studies. My favorite is Unlocking the Queue, which looked at how all three GETs could be applied across the Kansas and Oklahoma grids in conjunction with other large-scale upgrades. The measure of benefit there was, how much more renewable energy can we plug in, and then how much money would that save ratepayers? How many jobs would that create? We looked at across all of those values, but with that framing. I like that study because it looked at the real interconnection queue. It looked at the projects that were waiting.
It was fairly conservative. It didn't allow greater export or import in that region. It just looked at what can Kansas and Oklahoma take on, and it found that there was twice as much capacity for new renewables if we used GETs across the footprint, which is huge. It also showed in a follow-up study that the large transmission lines that had already penciled out, they were already going to be built, but when they were modeled in this forward-looking 2025 scenario, the utilization of those lines was higher, so GETs can actually increase the net benefits of a transmission line that's already planned and going to be built. That's another good result from that study.
Manish: Julia, I'm going to jump into something maybe provocative. How do you address the concern, going back to the point you just made, that GETs in, let's say transmission planning, could postpone or eliminate major transmission upgrades that would eventually lead to greater congestion or reliability issues? How do you address that concern?
Julia: I think there's been a shift away from that mindset because we-- That was an initial reaction that we got back in 2017 all the time, but now, people realize the scale of the transmission infrastructure that's going to be needed, and it's clear that we cannot keep up with the level of expansion that we need just by building new lines. Even scheduling the outages to make these upgrades becomes really complicated, and it can take years to just schedule the outage and then begin construction, so the situation is pretty dire.
To answer your question directly, there's going to be plenty of transmission to build. GETs will in some cases be a temporary solution, bridging the gap until that transmission is built. Sometimes they might be a permanent solution. Sometimes they could be a temporary solution that becomes permanent when we realize, actually, a different transmission line would be more useful than this one that we had thought we were going to build as clean energy development actually happens instead of just being forecast, so I really see GETs and new transmission lines as totally complimentary.
Manish: While we are on the topic of misconceptions, I think there's another one that's floating around, which is, DLRs are basically an operational tool only, and they really don't have any role to play in longer term transmission planning. What do you think about that?
Julia: I think there are different types of transmission planning and different studies that are undertaken. I'm not the expert on this, but I do think when a renewable energy project is being evaluated, they're getting their interconnection upgrades scoped out and the scenario that's being studied is a high wind day and that you're modeling, I'm not sure how fast 10 meters per second wind at the wind turbine and two feet per second wind on the transmission line right next to it. That's concerning, and the scale of the upgrades that can be required because of that mismatch in assumptions can be in the tens or hundreds or millions of dollars.
If we're looking at 1% projected line overload that is based on the study where the assumptions were inconsistent, that seems like a pretty obvious time where dynamic line rating should really be considered and we should not be rebuilding the whole line, and using our skilled labor and using our resources and lines to undertake a big upgrade when something much more reasonable could fix it.
Gil: May I ask you to think ahead a bit. What does success look like at the end of the decade for GETs?
Julia: I love this question. It's a little hard to answer maybe because it becomes a little bit technology-specific, but once these tools are in the engineer's toolboxes and they know how to use them and the infrastructure is in place for them to be fully integrated, I really hope that they get pulled out at every opportunity. Whenever a line starts to see congestion and there's curtailment, I want dynamic line ratings or advanced power flow control topology optimization to be the first thing that the engineers look at instead of curtailing that plan.
I want them to be the first things engineers think of when they're trying to solve these problems that could otherwise be very expensive. Really on any line where there's a lot of congestion, utilities should be evaluating grid-enhancing technologies to resolve their congestion because the payback period is going to be fast. Then I also think back to Manish's question about modeling, they should be integrated into every step of the transmission planning and operations processes. Are you using topology optimization to plan your outages?
Are you using it to do economic dispatch? I'm sure there are other scenarios where you'd use the software. It is a top-to-bottom process where utilities can plug these tools into all these different realms and that's different teams. I think it'll be an exciting time of transformation, but I can see these becoming the default tools to resolve a lot of these problems, especially in the short to near term. So much transmission planning happens in the 10 or 20-year timeframe but now you can start thinking about transmission optimization in the months or one-year timeframe.
Gil: I think I heard you talk about the-- maybe this isn't a misperception but these technologies in the UK and Belgium, they were implemented in 2008, some of these. The technologies themselves are getting better. It's not as if, gee whiz, whiz-bang new scientific experimental tech we're talking about. Could you elaborate on that? Am I right? The tech itself is getting better, but what we're talking about has already been in place for a decade-plus.
Julia: Absolutely. I think utilities in the United States were piloting dynamic line ratings in the '90s, maybe late '90s, early 2000s. The technology has been around for 20 years, obviously, since then communication infrastructure has changed completely. That's huge. You can beam your dynamic line ratings to your control center in a way that you couldn't in 2000. We have advanced computing and other tools that have emerged since then and improved results, but yes, the fundamental concepts are not new. Advanced power flow control.
There's other technologies that do power flow control, it's just that these tools are modular. They're lower cost. They're based on different technology, but utilities already considered those larger tools. Yes, none of this is brand new. It's just the cost curves going down and the opportunities expanding and then the urgency to use these tools that's changed.
Gil: That's well said. I applaud you for actually not using the AI buzzword in this whole conversation about technology. It's cool if it uses AI. I'm sure it does.
Julia: I think some of the weather forecasting and dynamic line ratings.
Gil: All right. Let's get to the final section. This is the portion of our program we call the hot seat lightning round question. There are no wrong answers, Julia. We just ask for the first response that comes to your mind. First question. The word or phrase I most overuse is?
Julia: Unlock. Unlock, definitely. We're always unlocking capacity, the queue.
Gil: A lot of unlocking. The key ingredient to my productivity is?
Julia: Early bedtime.
Gil: The most challenging part of my job is?
Julia: We're just getting so much interest in GETs right now it's hard for me to give everyone something actionable and that's such a good problem to have, but I'm really trying.
Gil: Indeed. The book that has influenced me the most is?
Julia: Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.
Gil: What's that about?
Julia: It's just a cozy little bildungsroman about a boy in the UK, but he's just got this really great way of showing us that life is how you interpret it and everyone's trying their best and growing.
Gil: How did you go from a bachelor's degree in physics to a career in communications and policy?
Julia: Well, it was a journey of figuring out what I could be totally obsessed with basically. The electricity system is a great puzzle of people and technology and institutions and physics. I guess that's the short answer.
Gil: I guess as a proof point to that. I was also looking at your social media and I cannot believe that you were able to write a fairytale based on FERC order 2023 that you suggested, and I have toddlers, if they're interested in a bedtime story about the interconnections problems and solutions. I won't ask you to recite it and we'll put it in the show notes, but wow. Tell us about how you were able to generate a fairytale based on FERC order 2023.
Julia: It started with an idea that Johannes Pfeifenberger from the Brattle Group put out that the transmission expansion problem was going to be solved in three pieces with new lines, and reconductoring and rebuilding, and grid enhancing technologies. I think I was listening to a webinar where it was all sounding very hard and frustrating to get what we need. I thought it's just not that hard and really as much as we might want to blame the utilities for not bringing on GETs or be frustrated at the pace, it's not necessarily anyone's fault.
We can all work together on this and we have the tools to fix it. It was a very hopeful story about personifying these technologies and how they would help three brave little generators chugging away.
Gil: I love it. I love it. We'll put that in the show notes. It's good for the holiday season for anyone that wants to read a fairytale about FERC order 2023. Final question. Finish the sentence, to me, climate positive means?
Julia: Just pushing for solutions. We have the tools. We just need to all get aligned on them. There are forces that try to slow down the solutions. There are forces that try to speed it up, but the closer you get to working on these issues, the more possible it all seems, even as climate science gets more and more frightening.
Gil: Thank you for that. Thank you for your time.
Manish: Thank you, Julia.
Julia: Thank you. This was a pleasure.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
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I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.