Industry News

Content by IDEA Published by UtilityDive

Summary

The National Academy of Sciences defines “resilience” as the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.  Since the September 2017 DOE NOPR to FERC, the energy industry has been working overtime to better define resilience.  FERC unanimously set aside the “90 days on-site fuel storage” provision espoused by DOE and opened a new docket (AD18-7) to more fully examine the current state of grid resiliency, asking the nation’s seven RTO’s and ISO’s to provide their definition of resiliency relative to the bulk power system by March 9.  Those ISO/RTO comments reflected regional variances as expected while sharing a common thread of the paradigm shift underway from central station power plants to more distributed generation.  

The New England ISO cited concerns with the growing dominance of natural gas power generation and limits of pipeline capacity into the region, especially during spells of extreme winter weather.  CAISO suggested a more holistic approach incorporating considerations for carbon as well as capacity markets.  Interestingly, ERCOT, though not subject to FERC jurisdiction, submitted comments on market trends including proliferation of renewables and functional capacity markets. MISO conveyed a general confidence that decades of reliability planning had resulted in system resilience. But the PJM comments may have set the stage for a deeper dive, suggesting that resilience in the bulk power segment was inter-dependent with resources seemingly beyond their control, namely pipeline and LDC communication and coordination highlighting the need for natural gas availability.  Further, in similar context to the comments offered by MRC and by IDEA, PJM discussed resilient resource compensation mechanisms, attributes and metrics.   

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