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Episode #156: 'FERC, Transmission Tech, and Wiring Change for the Future' with Rob Gramlich, President of Grid Strategies LLC [an Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast]

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The suite of challenges the grid operators of today and associated regulators are facing is unprecedented in both scale and urgency, but planning for the future is the DNA for these modern professionals. As power demands grow and FERC continues its rise from an obscure federal government body to a spotlighted decisionmaker, the landscape of government involvement in transmission planning continues to evolve. To help make sense of it all, the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast is joined by Rob Gramlich, President of Grid Strategies LLC.

Rob walks podcast host Jason Price and producer Matt Chester through the critical role of transmission planning and the impending FERC Order titled "Building for the Future Through Electric Regional Transmission Planning and Cost Allocation." Rob Gramlich, with his wealth of experience as a former advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood during the Bush Administration, offers profound insights into the evolving power demand, the implications of FERC's proposed rule on regional transmission planning (RM21-17), and more. Listen in as he digs through the intricacies of grid policy and the promising advancements shaping the grid's future.

 

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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: West Monroe. 

 

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Rob Gramlich's Energy Central Profile: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/rob-gramlich 

The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over: https://gridstrategiesllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/National-Load-Growth-Report-2023.pdf 

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TRANSCRIPT

Jason Price:

Welcome to The Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. This is the show that brings leading minds from the energy industry to discuss the challenges and trends that are transforming and modernizing our energy system. New for 2024, our listeners can now submit a recorded question to a future podcast episode. Just look for the SpeakPipe link in the show notes below this episode and leave us a voicemail with a question for a future guest. A quick thank you to West Monroe, our sponsor of today's show. Now, let's talk energy.

I'm Jason Price, Energy Central Podcast host and director with West Monroe, coming to you from New York City. I'm joined, once again, by the producer of this show, Matt Chester, dialing in from Orlando, Florida.

Matt, on today's show, we're going to discuss transmission with a lens toward how grid operators should be planning for the future of the grid, and the role that regulators can or should play in that process, including in our upcoming FERC's regional transmission planning titled Building For the Future Through Electric Regional Transmission Planning and Cost Allocation. So, Matt, can you summarize for our listeners about past grid policy decisions we've had on this show?

 

Matt Chester:

Of course, Jason. These are the types of reminders I always like pointing out to our listeners, to playlists we've built around certain topics. Of course, the grid is a major one, so we've done just that for the grid. If you go to our SoundCloud page for The Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast, we have one listed playlist called The Grid: Reliability and Resilience. If you check that out, there's I believe about a dozen episodes where you can catch a discussion from a DOE official about resilient grid planning. We had a utility CEO talking about the grid of tomorrow. We even had a recently published episode about what lessons we can learn from the Ukrainian grid, as they've remained resilient, and many more. No doubt, this episode today will be a key one to add to that Grids playlist as well, when we put it live.

 

Jason Price:

Thanks, Matt. Of course, today's guest knows a lot about the transmission industry, coming from FERC as a former advisor to the FERC Chairman, Pat Wood, during the Bush Administration. Rob Gramlich is the president of Grid Strategies LLC, a power sector consulting firm focused on policy in the transmission spectrum. Rob and his team have been at the forefront of some thought leadership about key changes and developments to grid policy, recently publishing a study that we'll put into the show notes, called The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over. We're eager to hear more, as well as look ahead to some near-term developments expected in grid policy. Let's bring him into the conversation.

Rob Gramlich, welcome to The Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

 

Rob Gramlich:

Thanks, Jason and Matt. Great to be with you both.

 

Jason Price:

Rob, let's start at the power demand report that your organization published in December. Can you give us the overview about why the study was performed and what were the conclusions?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure. Well, at Grid Strategies, we like to monitor trends in the power sector and that's why we've been very focused on transmission and power markets for a long time, particularly as low-cost wind and solar have come on the system, and as severe weather and other strains on the grid have shown the value of large-scale transmission and regional power markets. These are some of the longterm trends.

Then, a really big one that we were noticing recently, as were a lot of people, was this recent load forecast changes. Not so much coming from official government reports or anything like that, but really anecdotally. We do a lot of work with large buyers who want carbon-free power. We talk to them, see them at conferences, and the folks who are procuring all this energy have always wanted transmission and power markets, and all these things for the same reasons. But very recently, with the growth, the expansion of AI and the popularity of artificial intelligence, those same people, their eyes were bugging out. They were saying, "Oh my gosh, I have to buy twice as much power as I thought I had to buy three months ago." They don't know where to get it and their criteria have completely changed. So, that was happening. Then, also, obviously the Inflation Reduction Act had incentives for electrification, electric vehicles. That drives load. And the CHIPS Act, for semiconductor manufacturing, also power intensive.

We're just seeing all these things point in the same direction of higher load, higher power demand so we decided to take a look. John Wilson and Zach Zimmerman on our Grid Strategies team were familiar with the FERC 714 form dataset, so that's one. It's not the greatest or most authoritative, but it is one nationwide dataset filed by all utilities with a national regulator so it's got some credibility for that. Sure enough, we're seeing this trend pop out in nationwide data. That's why we did it. We tried to see, systematically, are these anecdotes adding up to data and a trend, and that's what we found. At least at the high level, as reflected in the title of the report, that the era of flat power demand that we had seen for the last 20 years seems to be over. That we don't know if it'll go back to the '70s level, or the '80s, or the '90s, or these other periods where we had two, or three, or five percent growth.

Public, we did have enough support to make the claim that we've shifted into a new mode and that all these trends are conspiring together to grow power demand. That's why we did it, that's why we put it out. Hopefully, people read it and say, "Oh, well I'd better take a serious look in my state, or region, or utility." Hire back the load forecasters who, used to be many of them 20 years ago. We haven't had many of them because there wasn't much to do. But again, we don't have all the answers as a short report. But hopefully, signals to regulators and the industry that things have changed, we'd better take a look in each region and start planning for the future.

 

Jason Price:

Okay. Well, all right, so we've got evolving power demand. Is the utilities sector on track to be prepared for this?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Yeah, I don't think so, generally. We pay a lot of attention to transmission development in particular, and that's one area where power demand can be met. Again, it already helps with integrating clean energy, and it helps with the severe weather, and reliability and resilience situations. But it also can meet energy and capacity needs. Very often, the best resources are remote from an area. If you look on a planning basis, whether it's a RTO area, or a vertically integrated utility, traditionally regulated state, planning is done by different entities, but somebody does the planning. I think they can look for more opportunities to cost effectively meet growing load with transmission. That's, we think, really important. There are a lot of ways to incorporate this load information into transmission planning so we think that's very important.

Generally, around the country, that is mostly not being done. It's worth, we think, raising. I'm glad you're doing this show. I think it's important for everybody to get busy on transmission planning. Again, for the reasons we already knew of but also this new reason, that maybe not everybody was paying attention to, which is power demand growth.

 

Jason Price:

Rob, you can from FERC so you know how this group thinks. Let's talk about FERC's upcoming proposed rule on regional transmission planning. What exactly would this proposal do and are its goals achievable?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure, right. They have this regional planning proposed rule, NOPR they call it in the regulatory world. From almost two years ago, Chairman Glick and the commissioners at that time put out the rule, it was voted out unanimously on a bipartisan ... Well, there were some differences between the commissioners, but mostly supported on a bipartisan basis. At any rate, there was a two-year period there with a little bit of uncertainty of who the commissioners were, and then also some other business to get to, like the interconnection rule. We can talk about that, too.

But now it's time, according to the chairman, Chairman Willy Phillips, to get to this regional planning rule. He's said he's intending to bring it up this spring. That's one of the chairman's roles, is to determine the agenda and the timing. That's what we expect to see this spring, maybe April. We don't know exactly, he hasn't said. They never quite know exactly until they get all the votes and get the order all written.

But what it does, at the simplest, highest level is require all transmission planning entities and utilities in each region who have transmission assets to plan for the future. To make their best estimate of what is future load and future generation, how many additions, how many retirements, roughly where are they going to happen. Recognizing that there's always uncertainty with forecasting, but shifting a little bit of the emphasis away from airing on the side of doing nothing to making sure there are at least least regrets planning done for known needs. Looking at multiple benefits and reasons for transmission, reliability and resilience, and incorporating expected new generation.

And not putting a thumb on the scale, in terms of whether renewables are better than fossil, or new generation's better than old, or doing anything that might look like environmental policy. But just, again, do what planners do, which is anticipate based on the best information you have, what does the new generation and load picture look like, and then get the transmission planning engineers to develop transmission plans to connect that generation and load.

At the highest level, that's what it does. People are, many of your listeners are probably aware of previous FERC attempts, like in Order 1000 issued in 2011, and previously Order 890 issued in 2007. And even Order 2000, which encouraged regional transmission organizations in 1999, and Order 888 in 1996 pushed on regional transmission. I think there's a pretty solid consensus to say yeah, the commission's been trying this for at least 25 years. In fact, 30 years if you include the regional transmission group policy in '93. But, never quite gotten it to work. We've learned some things along the way, some things work, some things don't work.

Part of the way to look at this order is okay, we've learned some things, now let's put in place what we know works. And, use the authority that the courts over the years have strongly clarified in FERC favor, in terms of its authority to do things like that. Namely, require certain transmission planning practices. It's got the authority, it largely knows what to do. There's a huge record of evidence, and testimony, and filings, and reports in this docket at the commission, so it has all the facts and analysis it needs to to act. Quite a lot of industry consensus across utilities, independent power, consumers groups, states. Extensive dialogue with states. It really is ready to act. It's a lot of work for the commission staff to put together, which is part of why its taken two years to get from the proposed rule to the final rule, but it looks like it's ready to go.

That's very exciting, in my opinion. In fact, I call this the biggest energy policy in the country, given the impact it could have on some really important activities to improve transmission planning around the country.

 

Jason Price:

Right. This planning program is basically referred to as the RM-2117, is that correct?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Yeah, that's the docket name. Yeah.

 

Jason Price:

Docket, okay. Then, you describe that there's a lot of consensus and this has been going on for quite some time. But, talk to us then, what is the counterargument? Why the holdup? Why is this still being discussed, given the need and given the consensus?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Well, there's always some resistance to FERC action. Mainly, because of the general resistance to Federal agencies telling people what to do. Even in the regions that are most aligned with this initiative that I've described, they do want to do things in their own way. The institutions are a little bit different in every region. The ways they operate, the power and authorities of states, and public power, co-ops, investor in utilities. It's all a little bit different by regions, which makes it always tricky for FERC to act in a nationwide rule that applies to everybody in the same way. That's always a challenge and we have that same challenge here.

And, general resistance to FERC requiring maybe utilities to do things they would rather not do. They may, for example, the vertically integrated utilities who want to protect the value of their own generation, which has been a theme in the past FERC orders in 2000, Order 890, Order 1000. Those are reasons that, over the last 25 years, both Republican and Democratic commissioners have said, "Okay, well utilities operate according to the incentives that we the regulator set up. It's our job, as the regulator, to make sure those incentives lead to the actions that create just and reasonable rates, and non-discriminatory access. If things are not working, then we the regulator need to act." That's the debate.

There are some utilities saying, "Don't touch our state, our region, we've got this. Get out of our business." FERC and many other parties are basically saying, "Look, you can do things somewhat differently in your region, but you can't not do it. You can't not plan for the future and you can't avoid the reality that these are regional, interstate, connected networks." It's a fiction, other than Hawaii, and Alaska, Texas, which are separated from the rest of the grid. It's a fiction that you can just do it alone, on your own, at the utility or state level. We really have to have rules that make sense across states and across regions.

 

Jason Price:

Right. Yeah, that collaborative is key here across ... Inter-regional collaboration is certainly key. That said though, the role of the government is, on one hand, to create and enforce such policies, but the other key opportunity is of course, the government affords is the funding. Talk to us about the state of the Department of Energy, funding transmission programs and developments. Are they doing enough? Are funds reaching the most needed areas? Share with us your impressions on this.

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure. Well, two answers. The first is that I think it's very exciting the Department of Energy, really for the first time in its history, has a major program and a whole program office called the Grid Deployment Office, whose job it is is to enable large-scale transmission. That's one of their jobs. That's very important. Most people who know DOE know of its R&D programs, and occasionally pilot programs with utilities, and sometimes doing studies with the national labs. Those are all still there, and they're nice to have, and modestly helpful.

But now, they have a Grid Deployment Office. They're really focused on deployment. Secretary Granholm uses the mantra, "Deploy, deploy, deploy." Then, her team of expert lawyers, and engineers, and economists have put together these programs. Certain provisions of the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act give resources, including financing tools, to the Grid Deployment Office. Now, they've mostly implemented those, they're still in the process of doing that. They have strengthened the backstop citing authority, and directives to study congestion and capacity constraints. It's a lot to do there. They've set up these programs and hired a lot of staff. I think it's really well positioned to make a longterm impact on transmission.

Again, it's not the government taking over transmission. This is largely not going to be government owned lines. It's going to be private sector, private capital. It's going to be private utilities and transmissions developers who do it. But, the government will be there as an enabler and a helper. With financing tools, permitting tools, studies, ways to build consensus among states and things like that. That's the first answer, which is that we have this exciting new opportunity in this program that really is in the business of enabling transmission.

The second answer is the however part. However, all that said, it really doesn't have a lot of money. In the scheme of things, it has barely any money for new transmission lines. There's a $2.5 billion transmission facilitation program that's sort of like a loan, so it's not really 2.5 billion going out. It's paid back to the government. There's a couple of $5 billion pots, but those are really for bolstering the resilience of the existing system. I'm sure many or most listeners are involved in some type of GRIP or other funding program. There's thousands and thousands of applications, as far as I can tell, coming in for different proposals.

That's all great, but again, it's largely focused on the existing grid, protecting against wildfires and other threats, and things like that. It's not really targeted at new transmission. New transmission is eligible for some of it, so maybe if you add it up, we're in the $5 billion range for new transmission. But if you think about an industry that's spending $25 billion a year on transmission already, adding five is really not transformative. It's kind of a drop in the bucket really, in the scheme of things.

Anyway, the good news is we have this program, it's a great platform for future contributions, but it's woefully underfunded at this point, to make a huge difference.

 

Jason Price:

You're out in the field, you see what's going on in this industry. Let's talk about technologies. A lot of the policy being put forward is based already what grid tech is currently available in the market. But when you look to the future, we have to assume a certain level of progress. Without naming names, but any specific advanced transmission technologies you're seeing that could change the status quo of the thinking by grid operators?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure. Well, I think there's a lot of developments in ways to deliver more power over existing rights of way or the existing system. If you take a neutral perspective about whether a new line and a new right of way is needed, versus just expanding our capabilities on the existing wires, which I think is the consumer-friendly way to look at it. Let's do whichever of those makes sense, or whichever combination of all that makes sense. That's really best for consumers, and therefore really what FERC should be looking at, in terms of achieving just and reasonable rates.

Then you start to notice all these technologies that have been deployed around the world. In places like the UK, where they have different incentive structures. All across Belgium, they have dynamic line ratings. That's one of them, where when the wind blows, that's the major factor in how much physically a transmission line can deliver. If the wind's blowing, then you can put more power over it without harming the line or annealing the aluminum. You can just put more power there and no harm done. But then, maybe the wind stops blowing the next day and you can't deliver that much. You really need to have a different line rating for day one versus day two, and that's called dynamic line ratings.

That's one, there's others. Power flow control, we can physically move power over different paths. That's also being used around the world. All over, a number of countries, a number of deployments. Topology optimization is a new one that came out of ARPA-E, it's a software. Those three are usually known as grid-enhancing technologies. There's also using storage as transmission, as a specific application of storage. You could think of that as another way to squeeze more out of the existing wires.

Then, if you think about the rights of way we have. Think about this country and wherever you live as a listener, think about how could you get a new right of way anyway near where you live. It's probably not going to happen. I'm in the Washington, DC area. I'm well aware of the rights of way that I drive past, where we do have some transmission lines. It's just hard to imagine or impossible to imagine new, big rights of way like that. A little easier if you're out in the middle of the country over farmland, and some public lands, and we'll probably get some of that. But there's a lot of places where we're just really not likely to get new rights of way.

Then, you think about how do we squeeze more power over existing rights of way and you can do some things there, too. You could do some of these composite core conductors, or super conductors, or different cables that can deliver a lot more power without sagging, over the same right of way. Some of those, you can put right on the existing towers, some of them you rebuild the towers. But either way, you can do it on the same right of way.

That's just a snapshot of some of the technology options. They have different challenges. Some of them are low capital cost and that brings their own set of challenges. Some of them actually cost a little more and have high capital cost. With the utility incentives, that brings a different set of challenges. Sometimes, the utilities like to have higher capital costs technologies. They make more, they get the higher return on big capital investments, but then their regulators scrutinize them more. That's the challenge there. Anyway, they each have their different set of challenges, but there are a lot of exciting technologies that are coming in. Again, they're way beyond pilot mode because they're being used widely in other countries. It's just that our unique incentive structure here makes it a little more challenging. Again, I think public policy is needed, FERC policy is needed to move those forward.

 

Jason Price:

From a utility perspective, they of course want to be ready for the future, but that happens with mixed results. When it comes to grading their progress in doing so, do you find that the typical utility is falling behind the curve? For those that are, what are the real sources of inertia?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure. Overall, I think most utilities are doing a pretty poor job of planning for the future. Without pointing fingers, there's various reasons why. Whatever, for whatever reason we got here, I think we can honestly look at the current practices relative to what needs to be done for proactive longterm planning and say there's a big gap there. We need to do better. It's not rocket science, how to plan for the longterm. Heck, we did it in the '70s and '80s. There are different points of our history where we did a lot of planning for the future.

But on specifically regional transmission planning, we had good strategies. Did a report for Americans For a Clean Energy Grid, it's on our website and their website. A report card on transmission planning. There were a couple of regions doing pretty well, like California and MISO, the Midwest. Most of them, however, got a C, D, or F grade on that. Trying to be very objective and look at the practices. Are you doing it or not? Putting a check or an X next to each one. That's on regional transmission planning.

On interconnection, there's been some reforms there. FERC Order 2023 was helpful, but it was very modest. We're actually looking at that, and trying to score, and give a baseline, working with the Advanced Energy Institute. Look for that sometime in the not-too-distant future. It looks like the grids are also not very good there, but that is at least an area where there's a lot of work being done in each region. Hopefully, the report will be a baseline on that and we'll see some significant improvement, even in a year. That can happen relatively quickly.

Then, on technology, we haven't done any formal assessment but it's really not been great. There's certain utilities that have done some things. PPL got an EEI Award for dynamic line ratings. National Grid in the UK does a lot, so their affiliate here does more than most and that's great. There's some other examples around the country where, probably just for management, leadership reasons, they decided to get ahead and be technology forward, which we'd love to see in others but I think we've got a long way to go. Again, I think policy will be needed to move, change the incentive structure and get more of the technology going.

 

Jason Price:

That's great. That's really insightful and we appreciate that. I'm going to give you the last word. But before we do, we have something called the Lightning Round, where we get to learn a little bit more about you the person rather than you the professional. We have a set of questions we're going to ask you, and we ask your response to be kept to one word or phrase. So, Rob, are you ready?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Okay.

 

Jason Price:

All right. What's your dream vacation spot?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Oh, well I'm heading to Devil's Thumb near Winter Park, Colorado to cross-country ski this week so I'm going to say that.

 

Jason Price:

Okay. Best part about living in the Greater DMV region?

 

Rob Gramlich:

I generally love the people around here, who are generally committed to public policy and interested in improving our country. I'd say the people.

 

Jason Price:

Do you have any hidden talents?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Not really. I will say that I think I've coached 70 seasons of youth sports, mostly soccer. I don't know if I'm talented, but I've done a ton of it.

 

Jason Price:

What was your first job?

 

Rob Gramlich:

In construction.

 

Jason Price:

How do you define success in your career?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Lasting impact on the issue we've talked about. Part of that is helping build a team of people, both at my organization and a lot of other organizations I work with, to improve their capabilities. I'm not going to be here forever and getting a lot of folks excited about this agenda.

 

Jason Price:

We're giving you the opportunity to challenge a future podcast guest. What's one question, energy focused or otherwise, that you'd like to pose to a future guest who is sitting in your shoes, in the lightning round?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Sure. Well, a lot of what we talked about is how do you move tens of gigawatts of power across large swaths of the country, so that's what I would ask them. There are a lot of ways to do it, we don't have all the answers here, but that's the question we're always focused on. It's hard. The answers are complicated, I think the question is simple.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah. I think we're going to be waiting a long time for an answer to that but it's a good question to ask. Nice job, Rob. As I said, I'm going to give you the final word. Our audience is made up of decision makers in the utility sector, who perhaps could use a pep talk or guidance from someone with your foresight. What do you hope is the one resounding message they should take away from today's conversation?

 

Rob Gramlich:

Let's plan our transmission grid for the future. We can do this, the industry did longterm planning in the '70s and '80s. We actually did longterm transmission planning as recently as the 2010 to 2013 era, built a lot of transmission in a few different regions. But we got our eye off the ball. Again, we know how to do it, we probably need to hire a bunch of young engineers and train them up to do all the work. But, we can do this so let's get going.

 

Jason Price:

Excellent. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for joining us today. Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies LLC. I've no doubt that people are going to have a lot of questions and comments in Energy Central community. Please stay in touch with them and look out for any of those questions that come through. Until then though, thank you again for joining us on the podcast.

 

Rob Gramlich:

Thanks, Jason. Great to be with you.

 

Jason Price:

You can always reach Rob through the Energy Central platform, where he welcomes your questions and comments. If our listeners have a question they want to have answered on a future episode of the podcast, and even hear their own voice on an upcoming episode, we've started this year by offering our listeners the SpeakPipe link. On the show, look at the bottom of the podcast episode and submit question, and hear your voice on a future episode.

We also want to give a thanks and a shout-out to our podcast sponsors that made today's episode possible. Thanks to West Monroe. West Monroe is a leading partner for the nation's electric, gas and water utilities, working together to drive grid modernization, clean energy and workforce transformation. Our comprehensive services are designed to support utilities in advancing their digital transformation, building resilient operations, securing Federal funding and providing regulatory advisory support. With a multidisciplinary team of experts, West Monroe offers a holistic approach that addresses the challenges of the grid today and provides innovative solutions for a sustainable future.

Once again, I'm your host, Jason Price. Plug in and stay fully charged in the discussion by hopping into the community at energycentral.com. We'll see you next time at The Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

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