Grid Geeks Grid Geeks

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, utilities and system operators have continued to manage and operate the electric grid, while dealing with a number of challenges, including: keeping utility employees safe, responding to abrupt changes to electricity demand, protecting customers and preserving reliability. In this episode of Grid Geeks, I discuss the challenges and experiences brought by COVID-19 with two electrical energy industry experts: Dean Sharafi, who heads System Management for the South-West Interconnected System in Australia and Senior Member of IEEE and Member of the IEEE Power Energy Society Governing Board and Juan Carlos Montero, Network Analyst in the Costa Rican National Power Control Center and IEEE PES Vice President of Membership and Image.

Applicable across nearly every sector, energy efficiency is a pervasive and untapped resource capable of transforming our economy. Not only a key climate change solution and the most cost-effective energy resource available, energy efficiency also helps reduce harmful pollution, creates jobs and saves consumers and businesses money. Yet, despite its fanfare among energy nerds, energy efficiency is an often overlooked resource. In this episode of Grid Geeks, I speak with Rachel Gold, Director of the Utilities Program for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), and Christine Brinker is a Senior Associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency (SWEEP) about energy efficiency policy trends, market impacts, and opportunities on the horizon.

In this episode of Grid Geeks, we investigate the efforts underway to reform the traditional regulated utility business model, as a means to remove the underlying economic disincentives for utilities to enable and/or support more aggressive clean energy policy goals (including increased deployment of distributed energy resources and energy efficiency). I speak with Hannah Polikov, Managing Director of Advanced Energy Economy, and Dan Cross-Call, a Principal with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Electricity Practice to learn more about the drivers for these efforts, how different states are approaching them, and what we have learned to date from the early movers.

Connecting renewable energy resources to the electric grid in most places requires access to new or existing transmission. However, the current pace of transmission expansion plus policy, regulatory and permitting challenges all pose substantial barriers to transmission and renewable energy project development. In this episode of Grid Geeks, I speak with Nina Plaushin, Vice President, Regulatory and Federal Affairs for ITC Holdings Corp and Amy Farrell, the Senior Vice President for Government and Public Affairs at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), to dig into the key trends and issues impacting large-scale renewable energy development and the transmission system.

As we mark the two-year anniversary of Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, Irma, and Jose, and with Hurricane Dorian having just ravaged the Caribbean and now impacting the Southeast and Eastern Seaboard, the resilience of the electric grid is still a front-and-center conversation. Yet, in spite of the growing number of more severe natural disasters and man-made events impacting the electric grid, efforts to place a value on resilience are still relatively nascent. In this episode of Grid Geeks, I talk with two experts on the topic of resilience, Wilson Rickerson, Principal with Converge Strategies, and Jonathon Monken, Senior Director, System Resiliency and Strategic Coordination for PJM Interconnection. We explore some key questions: How is resilience defined? Does it make sense to ascribe a value to resilience? What methods and tools exist to determine that value? Which entities are ‘responsible’ for resilience of the electric grid? Is there sufficient coordination and communication among those entities? What existing resilience efforts provide useful models for others to learn from?

The growing movement to electrify our transportation sector is beginning to reshape our economy, the environment and public health. The transportation sector now exceeds the electricity sector in terms of its overall contribution to greenhouse gas pollution, and the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) can reduce tailpipe emissions and clean up the air we breathe. But as we move to electrify vehicles, how do you get help people get over their range anxiety and make EVs more mainstream? What are states doing to lead the charge for EVs? How are federal actions impacting EV market growth? To dig into these and other fascinating topics, Ispeak with two transportation electrification experts, Sara Rafalson, Director of Market Development for EVGo, and Max Baumhefner, Senior Attorney for the Climate and Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.