Podcast: Are You Prepared for a Hyper-Complex Energy Grid?

At the top of the list was rapidly changing resource mix, and I think he actually understated it. Retirements of traditional generation, natural gas interdependencies, inverter-based resource integration, and DER performance and visibility. I'll just briefly describe each of those. So, these baseload generators, coal, and natural gas, that are spinning all the time, they're called spinning resources. Those are being retired at an alarmingly fast rate. We'll see another quote in just a minute. Many of the new generation resources are using natural gas as a fuel. And during extreme weather, what they found sometimes was a natural gas distribution system would freeze up. And these power plants didn't have a reserve fuel supply on site, so they would go dark. It would just cause all kinds of craziness.

Inverter-based resource is your wind generation and your solar generation. They are very different from spinning reserves, and they have their own challenges to try to incorporate into the grid. Basically, they can trip offline a lot faster than baseload units. DER performance and visibility. DER is distributed energy resources. So, if you have a large generator on your site and they call you to say we have an emergency, we could use your power. If you've agreed to do that, you get paid money on a regular basis to be sort of on standby. Some of those resources have taken the money, but they've underperformed. Under extreme weather, extreme is happening more frequently and broader, deeper, longer. And we've seen several examples of that that I can touch on in a little while. Energy and environmental policy. Oh boy. Electrification and emissions. We're going to come back to that in a big way because several things just recently happened. But there are other evolving threats in the landscape. Software vulnerabilities. Hey, these power systems can be hacked. Anybody can be hacked, from my research. Supply chain issues, ransomware. I mean, there was a whole pipeline that we shut down on the East Coast for 3-4 days because they had a ransomware attack. And physical attacks. A lot of people don't know it, but there are several, well, I think it's nine, extremely large interconnection transformers and one of them in California was actually attacked a couple of years ago. And it was almost pulled off. That threat continues to be out there. 

So, you know, that's where the hyper complex risk environment comes from. It's not me saying it. It's the people that know. NERC, you know, their mission is to assure the effect of an efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid. That's their mandate. Now, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the guys above them, also weighed in. Commissioner Mark Christie said, “The U.S. electric power system is headed for potentially catastrophic consequences as dispatchable generating resources are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on.” He went on. He said, “The problem is not the addition of intermittent resources such as wind and solar, but the far-too-rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”

I'm not, you know, a great advocate of coal plants. I mean, they're extremely dirty, and they have some terrible emissions. But it's a matter of timing. When do you replace them and how rapidly? What kind of disruption do you get? And so back to our friends at MISO. A quote from them during that meeting: “There are urgent and complex challenges to the electric system reliability in the MISO region and elsewhere. This is not just MISO’s view. It is a well-documented conclusion throughout the electric industry.” So, it's a pretty well-known problem, but there's so many moving parts to it that hyper complex tends to, I think, encapsulate that whole thing.