Grid overseer on winter grid conditions in New England: ‘Our margin for error is really tight’
By Jon Chesto, Boston Globe
As the summer temps climbed outside, inside the air-conditioned confines of the UMass Club, some of the region’s top energy industry executives were thinking about the freezing cold.
They were joined by James Danly, the Trump administration’s deputy energy secretary, at a New England Council lunch on Monday as they recalled the long hours needed to keep the lights on during the harrowing cold snap that stretched for nearly 20 days in January and February.
New England’s grid was put to the test. On typical days, roughly half of the region’s power comes from natural gas. But on cold days, that gas is used to heat homes and businesses, and power plant owners turn to backup oil-fired generators. Those were getting strained as well, as supplies of oil ran low, as well as filters for water used in those plants.
Danly mentioned his team delivered an emergency order to grid overseer ISO New England in under three hours, allowing local oil plants to exceed the limits spelled out in their air permits.
“In the past, it typically took five to seven days to issue an emergency order,” Danly said. “[For] ISO New England, we did it in 2 hours, 53 minutes. I’m proud of that.”
Danly said New England suffers from an infrastructure problem, particularly on the coldest days when not enough gas gets into the region, and there aren’t enough trucks to keep up with oil delivery needs.
“There have been some bad policies that have been implemented here in New England,” said Danly, who did not mention Trump’s interference with offshore wind development in the region. “Wood and trash were producing more electricity [at certain times] than wind and solar. … You can’t always rely on wind and solar to deliver when they’re called upon.”
ISO New England’s Vamsi Chadalavada was in his first few weeks as the organization’s CEO when the cold snap hit, and he admitted he was a bit nervous. It didn’t help that Hydro-Quebec was not sending much electricity along a newly built power line through Maine as expected, and instead keeping it in Quebec due to the cold temps there.
Chadalavada was communicating constantly with Danly, and with Dan Dolan, the chief executive of the New England Power Generators Association.
“We were left making sure every piece of equipment on the grid [was] used to its maximum output,” Chadalavada said. “I’ve had more calls with Secretary Danly and Dan in those two weeks than I’ve had with my family. … Our margin for error is really tight.”
So what does it mean for consumers? Higher prices, and dirtier air.
Bill Quinlan, president of transmission at Eversource, said the wholesale prices this past winter were two-and-a-half times the cost seen in an average winter.
“Customers will see that probably six months from now,” Quinlan said. “And they’ll certainty see it in their energy bills next winter.”
John O’Brien, CEO of Canal power station owner JERA Americas, urged business leaders in the room to push for legislation and other policy reforms that would help spur construction of more energy infrastructure.
“We’re in a period of time in which the region has made really big bets on certain technologies and expectations of net energy flows that have not come at the scale and speed that I think most of us anticipated they would,” Dolan said.
Dolan concluded by praising the hard work of his members’ employees to keep the lights on, while adding: “I hope I do not talk to Vamsi five minutes before Super Bowl kickoff ever again.”