Power Panel: Grid Resilience and Reliability

For me, resilience is all about recovery. And as Ken mentioned, there are many aspects to that. To build a resilient grid, you need a significant amount of infrastructure and data and information, and to be able to do that, you need to have the ability to understand what it is that you’re looking for and what these events are that are occuring.

Seth Johnson

Alan Ross: Hi, I’m Alan Ross, and this is the Grid Resilience and Reliability Power Panel. I am the Managing Editor and Publisher of APC Media. Let me introduce our guests.

Troy Cherry, thanks for joining us. Please let us know a little about you.

Troy Cherry: Thanks, Alan. My name is Troy Cherry. I’m the head of business development for Reinhausen Manufacturing, or MR. I work at the head of business development for the basic tap changing division, which is the voltage control that’s installed in large transmission and distribution substations.

AR: Thanks Troy. Next up, Seth Johnson.

Seth Johnson: Thanks, Alan, I am happy to be here. I’m Seth Johnson with a company called Powerside. We focus on the niche area of power quality, and so I’m excited to discuss today how that impacts grid reliability and grid resilience. I am the President and General Manager for our corrections business division, which is headquartered out of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

AR: Our next panelist is Ken Peterson.

Kenneth Peterson: Thank you for inviting me today. I’m currently with Luma Power, down here in Puerto Rico, as the director of our substations group. I started our large project substation group, which is a construction commissioning team and supporting internal resources. But recently I’ve been supporting our capital projects as well. I am setting up a lot of our long-term goals for some of the bigger construction jobs that we’ll be doing within the substations down here in Puerto Rico. And I’ve been doing this for a minute throughout the years as a contractor as well. It’s a privilege to be down here and be a part of the rebuild and reorganization of our Puerto Rico grid.

What does grid resilience mean to you?

AR: The first question I’ve got is, if you were to explain to me as if I was not a grid expert, what does grid resilience mean?

KP: To keep it simple, I won’t go into the public safety aspect of it, I thought about it for a minute and I relate it more to training for a marathon, right?

For a marathon, and I am a runner, I put it in that perspective and thinking about, it means to continue to make sure the body is readyfor the long challenge. Let’s think about resilience that way.

I’m currently going through some of our FEMA training now to be a part of the Incident Command Center upcoming next month during our hurricane season. This is part of the process of resilience, make sure that we are ready to respond for an incident, whether it’s a natural disaster or a threat, can be cybersecurity as well.

Just as being prepared as a marathon runner, continuing to train and make sure the body can handle that long duration, right? If I train enough and I don’t just show up on the day of the race thinking I’m going to survive this challenge, then I’m better to respond and be ready for the next race.

AR: Great analogy Ken, thank you. The body will react differently depending on how hard it prepared, just as the grid will.

Seth, same question to you. Any difference, or what’s your analogy?

SJ: For me, creative resilience is really the ability to withstand and recover from events. With that, there has to be an incredible amount of infrastructure in place to be able to recover from these events. To do so, this could be automatic, where there could be some manual interference there that needs to be done to be able to recover.

But I kind of like to think of it like the fact we all use computers in our daily lives, right? I personally use a PC, and from time to time, I’ll get a notification on the PC that Windows has stopped working and please wait for a response or close the program. And right at the time you’re about to close the program, it starts responding again, right? For me, that’s an example, an easy example of what resilience is. It has recovered itself, and it’s now moving forward and it’s working again.

For me, resilience is all about recovery. And as Ken mentioned, there are many aspects to that. To build a resilient grid, you need a significant amount of infrastructure and data and information, and to be able to do that, you need to have the ability to understand what it is that you’re looking for and what these events are that are occurring. For instance, if it’s an event like a tree that goes onto a power line, maybe a recloser trips or power comes back on automatically, that’s an automatic situation that occurs. It’s resilient. It’s recovered on its own. So that’s how I see it.

AR: Excellent. Auto recovery. All right, Troy, same question.

TC: My background is actually substation automation and protection, so I’m right down the same chain of thought as Seth. I think it’s the ability to ride through an event with limited impact on the service area or service territory. When I first came to the U.S. in 2007, these events were typically around summer peaks, winter peaks, polar vortexes, and demand Funny enough, the Reinhausen TAP changes are what would be used to tap down the transmission substation voltage to minimize the impact of these peaks and reduce some demand. And then the other option was to start cutting out customers to avoid a larger wide scale outage.

Now, when we look at it 15 years later, we’re looking at wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyber threats, domestic terrorism events, you know, these kinds of things. So, it’s changed a lot, and as Seth mentioned, there’s a significant amount of infrastructure that needs to be invested in to be able to increase the resiliency due to the frequency and the severity of these weather events, which are increasing. It is also affecting larger regions where utilities may not have been experienced in before. So now you bring into this kind of concept of utilities that haven’t been exposed to these kinds of events, now having to consider the restoration and resiliency kind of methodologies.

I think the important part is something that both of my fellow panelists mentioned from a resiliency perspective, the ability for restorations. That’s also added in the IIJA funding now, so there’s actually a place called out for resiliency and restoration. Utilities are doing the investments like automation, storm hardening, covered conductor, undergrounding, but that really doesn’t help our restoration efforts and we really have to think probably more closely on the actual topologies and the ability to enable the topologies to have the restoration capabilities. So, that’s how I kind of see that from an operational and a topology perspective for the grid.

Definition of reliability

AR: Talk to us about reliability, define it in the same way. Seth, you’re going to go first.

SJ: Reliability to me is the capacity to avoid disruption at the end of the day. Is power on or is it off? In many cases, there are areas around the world where they don’t even have sophisticated enough metering or smart metering to know whether or not power is on or off, right? I see Ken smiling over there, so, obviously, he’s got experience with that. It relies on a phone call. “Oh, my power is out.”

If you look at the reliability metrics of US distribution systems, which is published data, one of the things that you will see, while it’s not significant, is that the frequency and the duration of power interruptions have increased over time. There may be many factors to that, one of them, of course, being higher penetration of renewables, so inverter-based resources. Obviously, the way we’re generating power has changed.

The other thing would be things like climate change and weather-related activities. So, for me, at the end of the day, reliability is the ability to avoid disruption. The question is, what is it that creates and causes power disruption or a utility power grid to not be reliable? And that’s really where there has to be a lot of thought involved because there are so many factors that go into whether or not power is on or off. It may be as simple as a blown fuse or an issue with the conductor, but it could be much more challenging than that as well.

Utilities are doing the investments like automation, storm hardening, covered conductor, undergrounding, but that really doesen’t help our restoration efforts and we really have to think probably more closely on the actual topologies and the ability to enable the topologies to have the restoration capabilities.

Tory Cherry

AR: Troy?

TC: Exactly, Seth. I think that those metrics we talk about, like SAIDI, SAIFI, etc., I mean, they’ve been reported to the commissions and the stakeholders of utilities for decades. When I first started coming into the US, I was actually doing recloses. We just look at increasing the reliability metrics by adding reclosers, splitting feeders, getting down to 1,000, 500, even 200 customers per protection zone, right? If you lose a fuse, you need to send a crew out, but a recloser can trip, and remove those transient faults. So, a lot of that was reducing outages because of transient faults.

But having said that, a radial feeder is only as reliable as its feeder head fault or midpoint fault, right? You’re going to lose the whole feeder on the sustained outage. Once again, when the topology comes up and you need to add tie points, additional feeds, auto change over schemes, adding control and visibility to the system to just increase overall reliability. I think you can have a reliable system like most of the US here would probably say we’re pretty reliable, but are we resilient? That’s another question, right?

We must also look at the socioeconomics of it. Not everybody can afford a Ford Lightning, and a battery pack, with solar on the rood, or whatever the combination looks like. Not everybody has the funding capacity to do that.

Kenneth Peterson

AR: Ken?

KP: Obviously, reliability is heavily into the distribution system, which we’re all talking about. Transmission is important to get our substations reliable, but having the reliability out on our distribution systems is, if you will, our low-hanging fruit, right? Someone mentioned smart meters. I smiled because, yes, that is our big initiative that we are kicking off right now. When we first took over, it was the phone call. So just those little things, the simple things that we can think of, most of the time we take advantage of, it is a different methodology.

We were excited when we got WhatsApp to get notified instead of the phone call. But it is taking baby steps. Having the resilience goals kick back into the reliability of our distribution is a key thing. Having the ties and the feeders I think that is a great model.

Using another analogy, one of my old CEOs had his own pilot license. After he got into this he was really proud, as an engineer, of his airplane. He had upgraded the controls and it was a twin engine plane. If you’re up in there with him and he says, Ken, redundancy is our friend, and if I have a problem with one single engine, I have got redundancy, and I can click over, and I know I’m not going to lose my reliability grade, but we are going to land safely to wherever we take it. It is the same little concept there for the simplistic model to think of it in that methodology to just if I have that extra tie-in or I have another feed out of the other station and I only sectionalize this portion of it, I only have a set number of customers versus the whole 8,000 on this line or whatever the count is. And that’s what we look at, the duration and the time, when we try to talk about the metrics. But reducing those is obviously the key to what we’re trying to do.

What does the industry need to do?

AR: Now that we’ve talked about the problems, the definitions. Let’s talk about what the industry needs to do.

KP: I used to live in California and one of my bigger contracts was working with some of the utilities there when it was the solar race to see who can get solar up on the house first and get those contracts. California is kind of leading the way on electrification. Alan mentioned his son in LA with rooftop solar, an EV in the garage and now thinking of adding storage. Some of the things that are being discussed, having the shared resource within the neighborhood, where houses are linked together as a shared microgrid are actually taking place today.

I was able to tour, not too long ago, Duke Energy and their DC house. The whole concept, everything was on DC and you had your forward lightning that back feeds both ways as a source and then your battery source and your solar, and then transferring it in between the houses, having a shared resource. How do we look at that as a future microgrid to help with the reliability and redundancy? I think thereis a lot of discussion around it.

Then again, we must also look at the socioeconomics of it. Not everybody can afford a Ford Lightning, and a battery pack, with solar on the roof, or whatever the combination looks like. Not everybody has the funding capacity to do that. These are some of the interesting topics that are being discussed in the energy industry. It is going to make an impact when we can have the meter feeding both ways, right?

I know there are a lot of regulations that must be looked at. In Puerto Rico we have definitely had a lot of solar that’s been built to solve a capacity problem around generation. As the loads increase, everybody wants to plug in their vehicle at night. I know there is a lot of creativity around battery storage development to supplement that load after the solar current turns off and the lights go out. Those are definitely some of the things that I know are the hot topics and it is going to be interesting to see how we adapt and adopt.

My young son is going through engineering school now, so I’ll pass the baton on to him. Alan and I have talked about that in the past, in a few other interviews, making sure that as an industry, we are keeping the excitement for the next generation. Something that I get to work with is a lot of intern engineers down here in PR. Just to see the enthusiasm that they have, here is somebody who has been in the industry for a minute and they just start quizzing you and having that inquisitive mind and making sure that we are introducing the industry to them. It could be even sooner, all the way down to the high school level. Not everybody wants to be an engineer, but they want to do something with their hands. There is also a lot of research and development that needs to be a part of our future technology that I’ve kind of touched on.

As we continue to put more and more power electronics and electronically driven components onto the grid, they need to be able to withstand what is going to be the exxtreme temperature swings that we’re seeing from a hot side as well as the cold side.

Seth Johnson

AR: Technology will save us, right? Seth, same question for you.

SJ: I think we have to be careful on fast deployment of new technologies that haven’t been fully tested. That’s one of the reasons why, for example, solar in California, is anybody testing these inverters? They don’t know where they’re coming from and everyone’s just putting them on, right? We’re getting more and more sophisticated with that, but to be honest, early on, when we were doing this, it wasn’t really a big deal because the percentage of penetration for something like solar, let’s say, was so low that the impact that it could have on the grid was very minimal, especially when you look at it from a residential standpoint.

I think making sure that we put in the right processes and procedures to quantify and qualify different types of emerging technologies that are going onto the grid is important. A lot of what we’re doing and what we’re seeing for the future of our resilience and reliability of the grid is going to be driven by power electronics for electronics components, right? There are a few things I know about electronics in that they’re kind of like human beings, actually. They don’t like being really hot, they don’t like being really cold, and they don’t like being dirty. As we continue to put more and more power electronics and electronically driven components onto the grid, they need to be able to withstand what is going to be the extreme temperature swings that we’re seeing from a hot side as well as the cold side. Being designed to be put out in the elements is something to consider.

We need to be very diligent on moving quickly, to be able to get new technology out there, but we can’t just put technology out there that is going to fail or cause a problem. If we do, we go through the same cycle again to try to fix those issues, fix those issues, fix those issues; always fixing issues because we may have moved too fast.

What is interesting is when we talk about adding EV charging and bi-directional power flows on the edge of the grid, we really start to look at our distribution transformers, which we ran to failure for a long time. Now they are actually having an impact on people’s livelihoods, because they do need to charge their EV and they do need to do these things to get to work and to be productive.

Troy Cherry

AR: Thank you Seth. Troy, same question for you.

TC: There is a lot to unpack, so I appreciate the responses from Ken and Seth. I think I mentioned earlier that the severity and the frequency of these weather events are increasing, and now it’s reaching different regions that utilities probably hadn’t been prepared for or budgeted for. Now they are looking at resiliency and restoration measures. But most utilities have included things like storm hardening, undergrounding, fire mitigation measures in their Integrated Resource Plans (IRP) or Integrated Distribution Plans (IDP) right, their integrated resource plans or distribution plans for the five or 10 years. I think when we look at the old pillars of safe, reliable and affordable power, then we start adding safe, reliable, resilient, affordable power, it gets to be very difficult to keep that power affordable, because these utilities are really pouring in a lot of money in the underground, in the covered conductors for these kinds of events that we’re trying to be resilient for.

When we look at the U.S. with 1,800+ utilities and 1,200 of those utilities are under 100,000 meters, some even only 10,000 to 15,000 meters. The technology that they can actually deploy and afford to that an IOU can afford, then you’re really looking at a really challenging environment for Munis and Co-ops in Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, and so many other states. It is just a really diverse country with a lot of utilities to manage.

Then it also comes down to resources from a labor perspective and a skilled workforce perspective. What is interesting is when we talk about adding EV charging and bi-directional power flows on the edge of the grid, we really start to look at our distribution transformers, which we ran to failure for a long time. Now they are actually having an impact on people’s livelihoods, because they do need to charge their EV and they do need to do these things to get to work and to be productive. So, we are bringing in a lot of challenges, but I think that as an industry we have been pretty good overall in the US, adapting to a lot of these challenges fairly quickly from a utility perspective.

AR: Gentlemen, excellent, and thank you.

References:

Our original panel, when transcribed, was over 8,000 words, so we have edited it down to a manageable size for publication, but I strongly suggest that if you want more detail and information, access the full Power Panel by clicking this link. It will be time well spent.