The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG) and Rochester Gas & Electric (RG&E) has announced two projects in the Southern Tier have received awards through the first round of the Future Grid Challenge to help forecast and assess the impact of increasing electrification on the electric grid. Specifically, the projects will assess the impacts of increased building electrification, electric vehicle charging, heat pump use and the integration of distributed solar. NYSERDA also announced that up to $3 million is being made available in the second round for pilot projects that demonstrate sensing technology maximizing the integration of renewable resources into the existing energy transmission system. These efforts support New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) goal to achieve 70% renewable electricity by 2030.
“The Future Grid Challenge awards will advance innovative technology to better understand the impact of integrating clean distributed energy resources into the electric grid. The state has made grid resiliency and stability a priority as we continue to address the impacts of climate change, and this program will help us build the grid of the future by predicting how power will flow to the transmission system as more renewable sources are deployed across the state,” said Doreen M. Harris, president and CEO of NYSERDA.
Round 1 Awards
The first round of the Future Grid Challenge sought to gain a detailed understanding of the net impact of increasing low carbon technologies, including electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps, while using energy generated from solar panels on electricity networks. The awarded projects will partner with Avangrid and its subsidiaries, NYSEG and RG&E, to develop technical solutions that forecast and assess system impacts of new electric loads and distributed energy resources (DER) in parts of the Southern Tier. The selected projects are:
- Siemens PTI – Siemens PTI, in partnership with Streetlight Data and Cornell University, will receive $741,000 for a demonstration project hosted by the City of Ithaca to forecast scenarios for community adoption of electric vehicle charging, building electrification, and distributed solar generation and assess related electricity demands. Ithaca is expected to rapidly accelerate deployment of these technologies due to its commitment to achieving community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 with an interim goal to meet the electricity needs of government operations with 100 percent renewable electricity by 2025.
- ProsumerGrid – ProsumerGrid will receive $1.3 million for a demonstration project to develop locational and temporal models of solar, electric vehicles that are charging from on-site solar versus the electric grid, and heat pump adoption in Binghamton, delivering tools that can analyze equipment loading and optimize electric system planning for this key market in Avangrid’s service territory.
Round 2 Funding
Today’s announcement also made funding available under Round Two of the Future Grid Challenge that will support pilot projects for transmission line sensors with predictive capabilities in the Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca and Binghamton areas. NYSERDA and Avangrid’s subsidiaries, NYSEG & RG&E, seek to collaborate with solution providers to pilot advanced transmission line rating and monitoring solutions within the RG&E and NYSEG service territories. These regions include the areas surrounding Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca and Binghamton. This challenge addresses a high priority recommendation contained in a Department of Public Service order released in January 2022 for deployment of advanced transmission and distribution technologies for improved transmission utilization.
Solutions that track power line capacity with the integration of renewable power sources will give system operators tools to monitor in real time the condition of electric power transmission lines. Various methods for monitoring using sensing of power current, weather conditions and other factors have been demonstrated previously but not deployed at scale in New York.
NYSERDA is seeking the most cost-effective and scalable solutions that can be demonstrated on active transmission lines. Such first-of-a-kind demonstrations within a service territory are necessary to address specific, localized technical challenges and optimize designs, allowing utilities to invest in wide-scale deployment of advanced grid technologies throughout the state. Successful deployment at scale has the potential to maximize the amount of power that can safely flow through the existing transmission system, reducing grid congestion without the need to build additional transmission capacity and allowing faster integration of renewable energy resources.
Proposals for Round Two funding are due by 3:00 p.m. on June 22, 2022. For additional details and associated documents, visit NYSERDA’s website.
News item from NYSERDA
The software and analysis aspect of the grid as a whole is the gigantic elephant in the room to future successes in grid and energy dispatch use and technologies. The ‘easy peasy’ business model of the regulated monopoly enjoyed by the rote IOU electric utilities where the ratepayers get an electricity rate increase if the utility doesn’t sell as much electricity as it once did, “lost revenues” rate case or has made “bad decisions” in the installation of generation assets that didn’t work out and are not amortized when it is time to decommission the assets, “stranded assets” rate case. An example, I believe it was September of 2010 or 2011 a glitch in the power grid created a “cascading grid fail” across several southern California power agencies. This blackout lasted for 12 hours in many areas on a hot summer’s day. It took an investigation of two years by FERC and the utility agencies to parse the data and determine the exact cause and effect of the cascading grid fail. It was determined a “constriction” in the feeder from Arizona created the original cascading fail event that rippled through the grid and disconnected power for some 4 million customers. The cure in 2013 a (30MWh) ESS was constructed in Calexico California to keep this from happening again. Proper analysis gives proper results for the correction that is cost effective. The nation needs a thousand-fold expansion of this concept to create a robust national wholesale electric grid for the many utilities to draw from.